West Chester University: Poetry And Creative Arts Festival, Presented Virtually By West Chester University, Runs April 7 - 10

Press release from West Chester University:

April 7, 2021

Virtual workshops, readings, panels, and entertainment will fill the four-day event,
scheduled to align with National Poetry Month and the academic calendar. Pricing for
the festival has never been more affordable. This year, undergraduate students attend
for FREE and registration fees for all other participants range in price from $25
- $50. Individual workshop costs are $25 - $75.

Cherise Pollard, the newly appointed Director of the Poetry Center says, “Our hope
is to make poetry accessible and relevant to everyone through this festival as we
simultaneously celebrate the Poetry Center's community and honor our mission that
focuses on the study of craft.”

This year’s Keynote Speaker is Molly Peacock. Peacock is an American-Canadian poet,
essayist, biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre literary life also includes memoir,
short fiction, and a one-woman show. Peacock's latest book of poems is The Analyst, a collection exploring her evolving relationship with her psychoanalyst who, after
a stroke, reclaimed her life through painting. She has published seven collections
of poetry, including The Second Blush, love poems from a midlife marriage and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Her work is widely anthologized.

The conference attracts a diverse group of people from well-established poets to beginners,
students, and faculty. Workshops are offered on a variety of topics ranging from Working the Beat: How to Make Poems Sings, to Poetry and Performance in a Pandemic, and Empathy in Expression. Workshop Leaders are all published poets of national and international renown and
include keynote speaker, Molly Peacock, Annie Finch, p.e. garcia, Wes Matthews, Christine
Otis, Imani Tolliver, Dilruba Almed, and Shirley Lim, among others.

A highlight of the event is the annual Iris N. Spencer Awards celebration, which recognizes
excellence in poetry for undergraduate students from around the country with cash
prizes.

The West Chester University Poetry Center offers a variety of programs and activities that help expand its mission of bringing
poetry to an ever-widening audience. Since its inception in 2000, the goals of the
Poetry Center have remained consistent: furthering the study and appreciation of poetry,
providing the nation's finest instruction in the diverse traditional techniques of
poetry, providing an international forum for the discussion of poetic form and prosody,
training teachers in the art of teaching poetry and poetic form, and fostering the
necessary dialogue between practicing poets and critics in a culture that too often
separates them. The Poetry Center also recognizes poetic achievement through the Iris
N. Spencer Awards, which celebrate emerging poets at the undergraduate level, and
through the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, which goes to an unpublished book-length
collection of poems.

The West Chester University Poetry Center

This press release was produced by West Chester University. The views expressed here are the author’s own.