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This essay examines how the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival presents its namesake as a figure meaningfully shaped by Black women's critical and creative treatments of her work. The festival draws on and enters into the long tradition of Black feminist communities forged around and through Wheatley's poetry, but its print cultural traces are un(der)documented and un(der)preserved. Following the participants' understanding of the same, this essay argues that the festival's archival impacts must be understood as a register of Black women's intimacies and mutual address documented across its participants' prose, verse, visual art, and performance. Rather than treating on the scantness of the festival's extant ephemera as a phenomenon of anti-Black misogyny alone, this essay maintains a focus on how the participants' serious attention to each other's creative lives challenges its audience to consider Wheatley archives alongside other Black women in her own time and since. In so doing the festival and its participants model a Wheatley studies in which Black women participate as writers, readers, and most critically readers of each other's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the multilingual discourse of the Lehesaju Muusika international music and poetry festival, which takes place annually in Tartu, Estonia. Being an international cultural event organised by ethnic minorities, Lehesaju Muusika represents a unique source of empirical data for research on multilingualism. The festival attracts songwriters and performers of the so-called ‘author song’ or ‘bard song’ not only from Estonia, but also from all over the world. The key feature of this genre is the dominance of the text over the music. The spatial organisation of a concert hall represents a specific power constellation within a microsocial structure. Performing artists have the power to decide in which language they perform and address the multilingual audience, while the audience itself has an indirect effect on this decision. The artist’s dialogue with the audience represents a peculiar discursive entity within the discourse of the festival. Code-switching appears to be one of the inherent characteristics of this discursive entity. The present paper summarises some key features of international music and poetry festivals as multilingual cultural events, focusing on the discourse of the Lehesaju Muusika festival. It offers a brief analysis of the audience’s language profile based on the results of a microsociological case study carried out during the latest festival, in 2019. To illustrate the complexity of the multilingual communication during the festival, three situations of code-switching during the performance of an Estonian native speaker in front of the multilingual audience are described and analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on African American author Margaret Walker, including her 1966 novel "Jubilee" and her work organizing the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival in 1973, named after Phillis Wheatley, the first African American author of a published book of poetry. It examines Black women's literary practices, including sermons, novels, and poems.

The article offers information on the 51st annual general meeting of the Thomas Hardy Society at Dorchester, England on July 21, 2018. Topics discussed include retirement of Phillip Mallett, editor of the journal; Dorchester Literary Festival featuring poetry session and a Hardy-Barnes walk; and Study Day on book "A Pair of Blue Eyes" by Thomas Hardy.

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and 'ethnic unmixing', guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger.Drawing on tropes, stories, and symbols emanating from lost layers of urban cultural diversity has been an important resource in post-socialist city branding in many cities in Eastern and Central Europe that saw significant ethno-demographic changes in connection with World War II. In Chernivtsi, this is usually framed by narratives emphasizing tolerance, cultural diversity, and Europeanness, notions that are prominent in myths about the city in German-speaking Central Europe. A common strategy here, found in municipal city branding and in commercial efforts to draw on the multiethnic past in restaurants and cafés, is to deemphasize difficult questions about what actually happened to the celebrated cultural diversity and soften or ignore the temporal break. The article analyses how the International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz, that has taken place in Chernivtsi since 2010, works with the city's culturally diverse past and its literary dimensions, drawing on tropes from both local multiculturalist narratives and on the Bukowina-Mythos popularised by intellectuals from German-speaking countries. Although the festival is not a venue for working through traumas, locating events in symbolically charged places such as the Jewish cemetery and highlighting Holocaust themes in poetry readings opens up for difficult questions where the lost cultural diversity might become something more than only a resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues around Deaf identity construction have been analysed in sign language literature in terms of a strategically essentialised Deaf identity. The idea of more fluid and shifting multiple identities has informed Rachel Sutton-Spence’s 2010 analysis of four BSL (British Sign Language) poems. A theme that cuts across these poems is that being gay or lesbian in the UK is unproblematic and therefore not prioritised. There is at least as much emphasis on being Deaf and a sign language user. Other facets of identity such as race and personal interests also emerge in these poems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents several literary festivals and events including Ohioana Book Festival on April 22, 2023 at Columbus Metropolitan Library's Main Library, Columbus, Ohio, James Wright Poetry Festival 2023 on April 29, 2023 at Martins Ferry Public Library 20 S. Fifth St., Martins Ferry, Ohio and Columbus Book Festival on July 15 and 16, 2023 at Columbus Metropolitan Library's Main Library, Columbus, Ohio.

Mark Wormald and Mick Gowar both teach in universities in the city of Cambridge - Mark at Pembroke College, and the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Mick at the Cambridge School of Art, and Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University. Both are published poets, and both have spent significant portions of their professional lives teaching poetry, and encouraging the writing of poetry. They have a shared interest in the life and work of the English poet and essayist Ted Hughes, and have collaborated on a number of literary events that have brought together students and staff from both universities. But, as their conversation reveals, the differences in their backgrounds and professional experiences are as marked as the apparent similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the life and works of Mexican poet Kenia Cano. Cano was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Some of the books written by Cano include "Acantilado," "Las aves de este día," and "Autorretrato con animales." Cano has participated in several national and international poetry festivals. The article also presents excerpts of some poems written by Cano, including "Del bramido," "Palabras cercanas" and "Nadie escuchó el balido."

A biography of Bedouin poet Muhammad Fanātil al-Hajāyā is presented. He was born on August 3, 1955 and joined the Jordanian army at the age 15 where he served in the 1st tank battalion of the Royal Guard. He started attending international Bedouin poetry festivals in the 1990s. He has published eight oral poetry collections on cassette tapes and five printed poetry collections.

The article presents a speech by poet Lü Yue delivered at Gulangyu Poetry Festival held in Xiamen, China. Topics discussed include the basic problem of contemporary poetry and contemporary literature, rural imaginary used in classical tradition of Chinese poetry, and several aspects of contemporary poetry which includes classical or modern poems. Other topics include the relationship between contemporary poetry and readers, and contemporary Chinese women's poetry.

The article offers the author's insights on the participation in reading and panel discussions at a poetry festival in Newark, and the annual "Callaloo" conference, hosted by Princeton University in New Jersey in October 2012. The author comments on the said conference, along with its theme focusing on love. He also relates his concerns on the paneling of filmmaker Haile Gerima.

This article critically examines the Struga Poetry Festival established in 1961 when it placed Macedonian poets and writers on the wider map of world poetry, international literature and language. With this the festival carried a subversive and an emancipatory task that not only promoted Macedonia's national poetry but also pushed the nation itself onto the world stage. Although highly politicized (and deeply political), the festival emerged as a seemingly apolitical event that celebrated the “universal language of poetry”. Yet, with its aesthetic form of an open event devoted to poetry, this festival (in a very Bakhtinian manner) pinpoints the obvious carnivalesque element in manoeuvring and subverting established social and political hierarchies. Initially, it allowed Macedonian language and poets to join established national states that have “undisputed” (or less disputed) literary traditions. The subversive nature of this festival after the 2001 military conflict in Macedonia changed the direction and intensity of the Albanian struggle for improving their status into the Macedonian society. This event has effectively allowed a minority group to initiate social movement and engage in serious identity politics related to territorial self-governance, language and cultural representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on archival material from al-Jadid, the Arabic-language literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party. It discusses interviews with poets who experienced the poetry festivals. The festivals exemplify a particularly powerful concourse between the political and poetic in modern Palestinian history. The rise and demise of the festivals also discloses the ways in which poetic shifts conflated with a struggle over sovereignty. Poets who participated in the festivals sought to address the remaining people in Israel.

The article discusses the impact of poetry on the formation of state-society relations in northern Pakistan. It examines the influence of the poetry festivals organized by the Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq (Halqa) or Circle of Literary Fellows on the public perspective of Muslim faith, ethics, and politics in the region. It also investigates the role of poetic expression in power and social movements.

An interview with poet and editor Sarah Dowling and professor and author Charles Bernstein is presented. The two discuss their roles as co-organizers of North of Invention: A Festival of Canadian Poetry, a 2011 event that focused on North American poetics. Bernstein also mentions his academic writing concerning the connection between Canadian and American writing practices.

The article presents the Poem Express, an Dutch-based international poem poster competition for children six to thirteen years old. It mentions that the event, which started in 1992 when Jet Manrho was requested to make a children's program for Rotterdam's famous international poetry festival called Poetry International. Since 1996, the article continues, the event has developed to be a worldwide competition that has been participated in by children from thirty-three different nations.