The 2023 Princeton Poetry Festival, a biennial event, will be presented by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts on Friday, November 17 from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the Berlind Theatre at the McCarter Theatre Center. The festival will include a full day of readings, panel discussions, and a lecture by a roster of eight award-winning, international poets. The poetry festival is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. The Berlind Theatre is an accessible venue with an assistive listening system. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at lewiscenter@princeton.edu.

The Princeton Poetry Festival is organized by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities. The 2023 Festival will showcase poets from the United States, Belarus, Ireland, and the Navajo Nation. Poet and Program in Creative Writing Professor Ilya Kaminsky will present a lecture on “Conversations in the Air: How Poets from Different Times and Traditions Engage With One Another.” Other creative writing faculty who will introduce readings are poets Michael Dickman and Patricia Smith.

Meet the Poets

Five poets from the U.S. are:

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Photo credit: Kelly Writers House Staff

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and is the author of 14 books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses; Empathy; and I Love Artists. Her collection A Treatise on Stars, published by New Directions Press, received the Bollingen Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, among others. Plant Thought, a collaboration with artists Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle, is forthcoming from The Center for Book Arts.

Joyelle McSweeney. Photo credit: Majken McSweeney-Göransson

Joyelle McSweeney is a Guggenheim Fellow whose most recent volume, Toxicon and Arachne, was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a Literature Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and co-founder of the international translation press, Action Books. She teaches at Notre Dame and lives in South Bend, Indiana. Her next collection, Death Styles, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in April 2024.

John Okrent. Photo credit: Lydia Okrent

John Okrent is a poet and a family physician. His poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review (U.K.), Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Times, Field, and elsewhere. In 2021 he was awarded the Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize, judged by Carl Phillips for december magazine. His first book, This Costly Season, was published by Arrowsmith Press in May 2022. He works at a community health center in Tacoma, Washington, where he lives with his wife and two young children in a fisherman’s cabin on stilts above Puget Sound.

Roger Reeves. Photo credit: Ana Schwartz

Roger Reeves is the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His debut collection  was King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the year and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His most recent book is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays, published by Graywolf in August 2023. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, two Cave Canem Fellowships, and a Whiting Award.

Philip Schultz. Photo credit: Monica Banks

Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry including Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His other collections include Luxury, The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse, The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems, Living in the Past, and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of My Dyslexia and Comforts of the Abyss. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Valzhyna Mort. Photo credit: Tanya Kapitonova

Valzhyna Mort, from Belarus, is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press). She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize for Poetry, Amy Clampitt fellowship, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. Mort’s most recent book is Music for the Dead and Resurrected.

Photo courtesy Padraig Regan

Padraig Regan’s debut collection, Some Integrity (Carcanet 2022), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In 2015, Regan, of Ireland, was a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a Ph.D. on creative-critical and hybridized writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. They are currently a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge.

Luci Tapahonso. Photo credit: Robert Martin

Luci Tapahonso served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation from 2013-2015. She has published three children’s books and six award-winning books of poetry. Tapahonso’s poems are published in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), The Dine Reader (2020), and have been featured on the podcast The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith and in the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” series. Her recognitions include the 2022 Distinguished Literary Achievement Award by the Western Literature Association, a 2022 Indigenous Knowledge Holder Semi-Finalist from the Luce Foundation, and the 2021 Ostana (Italy) International Prize, which honors authors who write in their mother tongue. For the U.S. Library of Congress, she recorded a poem for Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry. She is professor emerita of English Literature at the University of New Mexico.

“It’s always instructive,” notes Muldoon, “to hear poetry read aloud by those through whom it came into the world. There’s a profound connection between verse and voice. Poetry has helped poets to understand themselves and, by extension, may help the rest of us to understand ourselves. An event like the Poetry Festival confirms what we’ve often suspected – that poetry is as necessary to our lives as our highway and healthcare systems.”

Paul Muldoon. Photo by Denise Applewhite

Muldoon is a professor of creative writing and director of the Princeton Atelier, as well as the founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. As an internationally renowned Irish poet, Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for his ninth collection of poems, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). His 14th volume of poems, Howdie-Skelp, was released in 2021 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. His 15th, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, will appear in April 2024.

The panel discussions will explore “poetry and the past,” a theme which Muldoon welcomes each poet to interpret in their own way.

Poetry Festival Schedule of Events

The Festival begins at 10:30 a.m. with a gala opening reading featuring all eight poets with an introduction by Muldoon. After a brief intermission, the day continues with a panel entitled “Poetry and the Past (1),” moderated by Muldoon, and featuring Berssenbrugge, Mort, Reeves, and Schultz.

At 12:15 p.m., a reading featuring McSweeney, Okrent, Regan, and Tapahonso will be introduced by Michael Dickman, winner of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and lecturer in the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton.

A lecture by Princeton Professor of Creative Writing and multi-award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky, “Conversations in the Air: How Poets from Different Times and Traditions Engage With One Another,” will be presented at 2:15 p.m.

The second panel of the day will be at 3:15 p.m. and will be entitled “Poetry and the Past (2).”  This panel will feature McSweeney, Okrent, Regan, and Tapahonso and will be moderated by Muldoon.

At 4:15 p.m., the festival concludes with a reading by Berssenbrugge, Mort, Reeves, and Schultz, introduced by Princeton Professor of Creative Writing and 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner Patricia Smith.

Princeton University has a longstanding tradition of nurturing poets. From Revolutionary War poet Philip Morin Freneau, class of 1771, to major post-war poets William Ralph Meredith ’40, Galway Kinnell ’48, and W.S. Merwin ’48, to Jane Hirshfield ’73, and Jenny Xie ’08; hundreds of renowned graduates have studied poetry and creative writing at Princeton. Today, poetry continues to thrive at Princeton under the direction of such renowned poets and professors as Dickman, Kaminsky, Muldoon, Smith, Katie Farris, and Susan Wheeler, and a number of guest and visiting writers.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center, most of them free.