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Bridging the Gap: Virtual Lead-Up Events

2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival Presents Bridging the Gap: Virtual Lead-Up Event Series

Ahead of the 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, we will hold a series of online events in April and May. We are pleased to build our poetry community across the state, nationwide, and globally. Below, you will find links to RSVP for virtual readings, workshops, panels, and more.  

Join Diana Cao, M. Cynthia Cheung, Nicole W. Lee and Angela Siew for a reading from the authors’ award-winning work and recent/forthcoming books. Work will touch both upon the Chinese diasporic experience – the impact of migration on cultural and linguistic legacy, the idea of homeland, or reinterpretations of stories of Chinese female historical characters and myths – as well as work outside this scope. How has/does identity influence the work of these writers (or not)? A Q&A and community discussion will follow the reading.

Facilitators will share select generative writing exercises using personal family and ancestral history as creative inspiration and content. Participants will leave the workshop with at least one writing sketch and other writing resources to continue developing their ideas while creatively archiving their own family histories.

How do poets grapple with recent disturbing events in the US and worldwide? Four of us (Martha Collins, Charles Coe, Richard Hoffman, and Steven Riel) whose work has collectively demonstrated longstanding engagements with various civil and human rights movements (including the freedom of creative writers to express themselves) read from their work and discuss how the current political climate affects their creative lives. Continuing in a long tradition of poets who respond to the larger issues of their times, the panelists will discuss why and how they do so.

Many of us write to express our feelings, explore our passions, and even inspire others who may share experiences/identities with us. Your inner magic is what makes you the poet that you are—you are the only one who can write your story.

In this generative workshop, we will learn about writing with safety, specificity, and authenticity. Together we will access our inner truths and learn techniques to work through/with emotional roadblocks, unreliable memory, or any other obstacles that prevent us from being present in our own power. Through various writing prompts and guided reflective free-writing, we will foster strong connections to home, self, identity, interests, and the body.
We will discuss examples and draw wisdom from writers such as Rachel McKibbens, Porsha Olayiwola, Hanif Abdurraqib, Noor Hindi, and others.

Four UK award-winning Black Poets/Academics talk about the unique approach to ekphrasis in their latest poetry collections. From 4 different vantages of the black gaze, they fuse a relationship between poetry and the visual arts. They share both their poems and praxis. Malika Booker – An Alternative History of Stones (TBC 2025), Karen McCarthy Woolf- Top Doll (Dialogue Books 2024), Elontra Hall – Blacktop Cathedral (TBC), Nick Makoha – The New Carthaginians (Penguin 2025).

Four writers of SWANA heritage ask how ancestral languages influence their writing in English. Is the inability to speak one’s mother tongue a failure, an opportunity, or both—simply the reality for diaspora writers? How can we render personal interpretations of our collective mythologies to expand what is (un)translatable or (il)legible in both cultures? And how does writing in English affect our claims to an ethnic community where many presume that belonging depends on understanding the language?

This reading and conversation gathers three contributors to the landmark 50th anniversary issue of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Alana Benoit, Leslie McIntosh, and Robert Randolph will read from their contribution to the anniversary issue. Also, McIntosh will moderate a discussion on poetics, the literary arts landscape of the current time, and what it means to be part of the trans/muted vanguard of black writing.

The Relatively Queer workshop series offers an interactive overview of strategies for recovering and narrativizing concealed traces of trans* and queer history in families of origin. Cohering around themes of (Re)Situating, Archiving, and Imagining, these consciously non-hierarchical techniques scaffold our cumulative engagement with occluded elements of our family histories and seed an evolving virtual community to nourish and sustain this reparative work. This reading will feature five readers who have participated in past iterations of the workshop (including project founders K Angel, Lloyd Meadhbh Houston, and Erica Rivera), allowing them to showcase work that they have generated through the workshop, as well as answer questions about upcoming projects, publications, and events. This event will also include a short open mic (10-15mins) to give participants doing similar work a chance to showcase their voices as well.

Poetry calls on us to be both courageous and vulnerable. This panel features six poets whose poems make us feel braver, as humans and as poets. How do we find the courage to write the truth about our lives? How can we witness change and chaos in brave ways?

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