The 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Adding an event to your sched does not guarantee you a spot in a workshop. Capacity for workshop spaces is 30 people. We recommend arriving as early as possible. In the case a workshop is filled to capacity, please check out some of our other great Festival programming.

The “House of Hope” Poetry Quilt

for Sekou Sundiata and Lucille Clifton

Mass Poetry is pleased to present "House of Hope,” a quilt made by multimedia visual artist, activist, and poet L’Merchie Frazier. Made of nylon, organza, and silk, the quilt excerpts lines from 200 poems published by Mass Poetry during the pandemic as part of “The Hard Work of Hope” poetry series during the pandemic. The series asked poets to pay witness to what was happening in their world in an unprecedented time in America—the horrible and the beautiful, the quiet and the revolutionary—and featured poems by BIPOC, disabled, and Queer poets. The quilt will be on view Friday, May 5th to Sunday, May 7th at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts as part of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

You can meet the artist on Friday, May 5, 7:30 PM at the headline reading, or be part of her “Hope Story Scrolls” Workshop on Sunday, May 7, 2-3 PM. (This event will be capped at 20, and the first 20 to arrive will be admitted)