Saturday, Apr 12, 2025 at 8:30am
Sierra Poetry Festival is a project of Nevada County Arts Council. We will host our 9th Annual SIERRA POETRY FESTIVAL on April 12, 2025 at The Center for the Arts, in Grass Valley, CA, attended by some of our most exciting local, national, and international poets and performers, in the midst of a month-long FRINGE POETRY FESTIVAL, taking place in venues across Nevada County and beyond.
Sierra Poetry Festival marks National Poetry Month from the rolling foothills of California’s Gold Country to the rugged High Sierra, bringing a rich literary community together to celebrate the spoken word and reach out to new audiences in fresh ways. Through Sierra Poetry Festival we also celebrate California Arts, Culture & Creativity Month and we draw attention to our two coveted California Cultural Districts.
Why Poetry?
Like communities across the world, we believe that poetry has the power to inspire, heal, and build bridges. We believe that it is a healthy way to share experiences, teach patience and joy, and bring communities together.
Youth Participation
A key priority for Nevada County Arts Council at Sierra Poetry Festival is local youth. We want to offer them an opportunity to grow and thrive – either through poetry recitation or through the simple enjoyment of listening to poetry read by some of our most eminent poets. Our youth can enjoy main stage readings, attend workshops, and participate in the free fringe festival poetry pop-up events that take place all the way through National Poetry Month in April. Our student festival tickets are offered free of charge – and your sponsorship will help us cover the costs for this.
Celebrating National Poetry Month
Sierra Poetry Festival marks National Poetry Month from the rolling foothills of California’s Gold Country to the rugged High Sierra, bringing our rich literary community together to celebrate the spoken word and reach out to brand new audiences in fresh ways.
Join the Sierra Poetry Festival family
Our Sierra Poetry Festival family is more than our presenter line-up. It is you, our audience members, sponsors, social media specialists, our videographers, photographers, caterers, and our many volunteers. You support Sierra Poetry Festival in many different ways, and we thank you.
2025 Program Schedule
8:30: Doors Open
Registration
Festival Café opens
Poets & Presenters check in
Poetry Place begins!
9:00—9:15: Welcome
Honoring the Nisenan and their homelands, with Shelly Covert, Executive Director, Nevada City Rancheria
Welcome with Eliza Tudor, Executive Director, Nevada County Arts Council
9:20—10:00: Keynote
Kim Addonizio || Hope, Uncertainty, and Creativity: Notes on Living and Writing
In this keynote talk, acclaimed poet Kim Addonizio explores the intersections of hope, uncertainty, and creativity through poetry, reflection, and existential questions. Alongside her own, she will share work by poets and thinkers, offering insights into the challenges and revelations of the creative life. The session will conclude with a word/music performance featuring guitarist Danny Caron.
10:00—10:45: Morning Readings
10:45—10:55: Break
On the way to workshops….
10:55—11:55: Morning Workshops
The Archival Self || with Anthony Cody
The archive is often in libraries, museums, history books, and the internet. However, that is an archive that is often at a distance and potentially diminishes the wealth of archival knowledge and artifacts that we carry in our life. This is the archival self of oral histories, photo albums, and the footprints we knowingly and unknowingly leave in the world. In this generative session, we will explore the many variations of archive and archival artifact, and generate creative work that honors the archival self.
Ancestral Poetics || with Brynn Saito
What is an ancestor? How does calling on our ancestors—from human and more-than-human realms—enrich, ground, and challenge our poetic practice? In this workshop, we’ll explore a range of poetic forms—epistolary, ecological, documentary, lyric, experimental—that create frameworks for exploring our own hauntings and hauntedness. We’ll listen for the silences that exist beyond language’s expressive scope. We'll describe the silence. Kim Hyesoon posits a “poetry of hearing” in which the poet listens for the voices of the dead and guides their spirits into the afterlife. What does such an orientation make possible? You are a future ancestor. What do you have to say?
Responding to Current Events with Poems of History and Hope || with Karen Terrey
What are some techniques for responding to current events that we are experiencing in our poems? Finding agency and handling the immediacy of the material can feel overwhelming.
Poems by poets we admire that manage history and hope will be our guides to find brave approaches to the subject. The first part of this workshop explores the craft of powerful narrative and lyric poems. We’ll read poems that integrate social / public experience with the personal. How does the poet enter the subject matter? How are poetic elements incorporated, such as voice, image, and form? We will consider choices the poet makes such as who is the audience, who is the speaker, and what is the conceit? What other choices can we make in our own poem writing as response to current and historic events?
The second part of this workshop will be a generative writing session. Using the poems we’ve read as models with provocative prompts, we’ll draft one or two new poems. You’ll leave with new ideas of how to handle challenging and charged material.
11:55—12:45: Lunch
Lunch and Refreshments
12:45—1:30: Community Voices
Celebrating our Open Mic Winners, presented by Jori Phillips
Poetry Out Loud student recitation: with student finalists
Putting the Punk back in Poetry: Joey Henry, Nevada County Youth Poet Laureate
1:30-2:20: In Conversation | Annie Finch, Randall Mann, and Christopher Childers
In a world shadowed by crisis, this year’s Conversation is a compelling inquiry into poetry’s role in shaping memory, resilience, and renewal. Celebrated poet Randall Mann, acclaimed translator and classicist Christopher Childers, and visionary poet and scholar Annie Finch join us to explore Sierra Poetry Festival’s theme, Hope and History. Drawing from ancient and contemporary verse we will consider how poetry bears witness to history, reconciles past and present, and shapes what lies ahead. With Childers illuminating the lyric legacies of antiquity, Mann offering incisive meditations on contemporary life, and Finch bringing her deep knowledge of form, incantation, and poetic lineage, this conversation will offer critical new ways of thinking about poetry’s enduring power to hold time, transformation, and truth. Moderated by Maxima Kahn.
2:20-2:30: Break
2:30-2:45: Poetic Cinema / musicians / improv
2:45-3:45: Afternoon Readings
3:45-3:50: Break
On the way to afternoon workshops…
3:55-4:55: Workshops
Joining Poetry’s Dances: Explorations in the Magic of Meter || with Annie Finch
Reading aloud, chanting, creating, revising, and generating new poems, we will journey through the dancing meters of our language. As we consider poetic meter in its full diversity, consciousness alters and our brains open into a whole other mode of poetic creation. This delicious metrical adventure may uncover unexplored magical potential within your own unique poetic voice—and provide you with tools that will continue unfolding within you for a lifetime. Optional preparatory reading list: prepare.anniefinch.com
The Sound of Sound || with Sands Hall
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Shakespeare writes, and as an actor speaks these lines—You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout!—the audience hears, in those vowels and consonants, the storm whirling around and within King Lear. Of course such aural purpose and power is not limited to theatre; all poetry is meant to be read aloud. We get to hear when a series of Ts may tickle, a couple of Ds deaden, or a long O mourn. In this workshop, we’ll examine how poets create sounds that reflect and deepen what their works address; prompts allow you to purposefully play with these ideas in your own poems.
Cloudy Rhodes Carrier
5:00 Post-Poetry Unwind
Happy Hour—the Center’s no-host bar and refreshments
Book Signing by our featured poets
6:00: It’s a wrap!
