Poetry

Join poet and editor Pádraig Ó Tuama for a reading and conversation centered around 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection, an anthology that explores the beauty, complexity, and necessity of human connection. Ó Tuama, also the author of Kitchen Hymns – a tender collection that meditates on ritual, intimacy, and the sacred within the ordinary – will be joined by two acclaimed contributors: Denise Duhamel, whose new book Pink Lady: Poems is a vibrant,…

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, three authors discuss the challenges of telling the stories of their parents and lovers, examining love, loss, and identity across genres and generations. Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The 14 pieces in Andrew Lam’s Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss,…

Join us for a panel with three highly regarded Jewish American poets as they reflect on the life and work of midcentury poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-62), a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize whose poetry came to fruition at a time of cultural change set against the historical rupture of the Holocaust and World War II. Rodger Kamenetz, Jacqueline Osherow, and Maxim D. Shrayer were part of a collective of 18 scholars working over a period of 15 years with editor Victoria Aarons to create  Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time – a collection of essays and selected poems.…

Written over the span of a decade, Green of All Heads is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. In A Sharper Silence, Michael Hettich reaches into the wilds to find some measure of the eternal that might wedge itself between himself and the unthinkable: the death of his beloved. He calls upon memory as if to rewind their lives together and forestall the inevitable.…

These novels-in-verse speak truth into the world. Based on a true story, A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez by Mária Dolores Águila is a vivid and uplifting middle-grade novel about one child’s courage to stand up for what is right. Told through searing free-verse, journal entries, and interspersed fill-in-the-blank poetry prompts, Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyerr reminds readers there is always hope when a teen fights for her right to determine what happens to her body,…

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, he examines this subject through a more prosaic – but equally rich – lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin,…

Literally Everyone Is Invited: An Ode to South Florida celebrates the 10th anniversary of the ZipOde – a playful, placed-based poetic form created in 2015 by O, Miami in partnership with WLRN. Edited by Gesi Schilling and Sarah Trudgeon and published by O, Miami, this vibrant collection features poems and photographs by 500 South Floridians. Literally Everyone Is Invited is part art book and part poetic love letter to South Florida, told by the people who live it. Panelists include photo editor Schilling,…

In Black Mestiza, Yael Valencia Aldana reckons with her identity as a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots and pays homage to the legacy, resilience, and fortitude of her ancestors as a mixed-race woman, daughter, and mother. Drawing on various languages and geographies from South Korea to Peru to the American heartland, Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work – in, and on,…

This panel brings together three poets whose distinct voices form a harmony of female subjectivity, resilience, adaptation, and innovation around questions of art, pop culture, and globalization. Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity. Carlie Hoffman’s One More World Like This World is a lyrical study of contemporary life – its lines echo amidst the imbalanced interdependence of globalization,…

Un sol caído avanza, de la venezolana María Auxiliadora Álvarez, es un recuento de la memoria y los mundos perdidos a consecuencia de la inmigración, como la familia, los amigos y la lengua. En Aguas madres, la poeta española Leire Bilbao parte de la vivencia de la maternidad para reflexionar sobre la identidad propia, su construcción y su destrucción. La argentina Mercedes Moresco llega con Pétalos negros,  una colección de poemas que responde a un estado del alma en el que todo decir sobra,…

Poet-translators read from their latest collections and discuss how they navigate bilingualism and balance their own creative work with the art of translation. Today’s Morning Vocabulary is renowned South Korean poet and Wit N Cynical poetry bookstore owner Yoo Heekyung’s debut collection, translated into English for the first time by Stine An. At once image-rich, lyrical, and searingly sociopolitical, Homeland of Swarms is award-winning Venezuelan poet Oriette D’Angelo’s English debut, translated from Spanish by Lupita Eyde-Tucker.…

Leire Bilbao (España) sobre lo poético como instrumento para tratar todo tipo de temas en la literatura infantil y juvenil.   EN COLABORACIÓN CON   Compra Aguas Madres – Bilbao…

Each fall, Miami Book Fair invites the authors and translators of 50 National Book Award longlisted titles to gather in Miami following the National Book Awards Ceremony in New York. Join the honorees in poetry – Gbenga Adesina, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Cathy Linh Che, Tiana Clark, Rickey Laurentiis, Esther Lin, Natalie Shapero, Richard Siken, and Patricia Smith – as they read from and discuss their books and answer your questions about writing,…

In Last Chance Live! by Helena Haywoode Henry, a teenage girl on death row competes on a reality show and must decide what forgiveness, family, and freedom mean when the stakes are literally life or death. In The L.O.V.E. Club by Lio Min, three estranged teens must survive being pulled into a video game created by their missing friend, but can they stay the course when hard truths confront them alongside the game bosses? In the genre-bending novel-in-verse,…

National Poetry Series winner Keith S. Wilson, Games for Children, will be in conversation with the judge who selected his manuscript, Rosalie Moffett, Making a Living. Together they will read poems from their newest books and discuss the lifespan of a poetry collection from manuscript-in-progress to published book. They will also reveal what it’s really like to win – and judge – book prizes while balancing writing, careers, and the rest of life. Moderated by MBF’s Emerging Writer Fellow in Poetry Simone Zapata.…

Driven by her passion to nurture the connection between poetry and people, Miami-Dade County Poet Laureate Caridad Moro-Gronlier will launch Generation 305: An Intergenerational Poetry Project at Miami Book Fair. Moderated by Moro-Gronlier and Nicole Tallman, poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County, this event will showcase Generation 305 poems written to promote, develop, and create multigenerational dialogue, as well as preserve the intergenerational stories in our community. Come listen to Generation 305 poems by selected project poets Richard Blanco,…

Head down to the Fair by 9 a.m. to get free entry, a free cup of Joe and the best seats possible to see Naomi and Tracy! As an invitation toward meaning and connection, National Book Award finalist and former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will discuss how celebrations of joy, family, and poetry in their new books are fundamental to our capacities to love,…

The 2025 National Book Award-honored authors in young people’s literature – including María Dolores Águila, K. Ancrum, Daniel Nayeri, Hannah V. Sawyerr, Maria van Lieshout, and Ibi Zoboi – visit Miami Book Fair to share from and about their books, and answer questions from Miami-Dade County students. Hosted by Ebony LaDelle, author of You’ve Got a Place Here, Too: An Anthology of Black Love Stories Set at HBCUs and This Could Be Forever. For more information and to RSVP,…

Like wind on a lake, newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s 12th book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man. Drawing on craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age – endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change – exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against the Anthropocene,…

Join us for “Poetry City: Ciudad Poesía,” an immersive performance showcasing the evolution of Miami’s poetry through a curated lineup of voices spanning decades and movements. A variety of local poets will perform alongside a live jazz trio, creating a dynamic and engaging presentation that brings the city’s literary and musical rhythms together in celebration. Co-hosted by The Biscayne Poet, Oscar Fuentes, and Nicole Tallman, poetry ambassador for the Miami-Dade County Mayor’s Office, this performance will be the grand finale to the upcoming Poetry City documentary,…

Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology edited by poet and critic RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ gathers more than 180 poets in Spanish and English spanning from the 17th century to the present. These poems bear witness to the beauty and power of this vibrant and expanding tradition: its profound engagement with pasts both mythical and historical, its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity, and its vision of a nation enriched by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees,…

Through poetry, interviews, and images, Daniela Perez Miron’s Ventanitas: A Window into Miami’s Coffee Culture, photographed by GESI SCHILLING, celebrates the lives of the people who gather at the city’s coffee windows for conversation and human connection. Joining Schilling are contributors EILEEN ANDRADE, CARLOS FRÍAS, TERE ESTORINO, and MIKE ROMEU; moderated by MELODY SANTIAGO CUMMINGS, executive director of O, Miami.   SPONSORED BY Buy Ventanitas: A Window into Miami’s Coffee Culture…

Join us for a discussion on the tender and difficult poetry found between religious traditions, queer desire, Jewish transfemininity, cultural histories, and the ethical knots of sacred texts. Structured around the 12 parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, JESSICA JACOBS’ unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world and the author’s experiences growing up queer, embracing one’s sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, and other imposed roles of womanhood. In Transgenesis, AVA NATHANIEL WINTER challenges concepts of the beautiful and the sacred,…

LIZETTE ESPINOSA ofrece un volumen desgarrador que ha sido escrito con la pasión y la frialdad de quien conoce los retos de la existencia; GERMÁN GUERRA presenta su Antología personal 1998-2018 con los textos más representativos de más de un cuarto de siglo de labor poética y seis poemas inéditos hasta la fecha; CARLOS PINTADO llega con una obra donde un sutil tapiz de música impregna la historia y la cinematografía de cada poema. En conversación con la escritora y actriz ROSIE INGUANZO.…

ARMEN DAVOUDIAN’s The Palace of Forty Pillars tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America in order to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home. SARETTA MORGAN opens Alt-Nature to the desert as a practice of sensuality in which landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of being and becoming along meridians of environmental degradation,…

Join us for a poetry reading and conversation on the role of the localized poet laureate in service to the community. DIANNELY ANTIGUA (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) grapples with the body as a site of pain and trauma in Good Monster, chronicling her reckoning with shame, her fallout with faith, and the desire to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body. Love Prodigal by TRACI BRIMHALL (Kansas) lives in the dishevelment of starting over from a divorce and a new diagnosis,…

Miami Book Fair’s own inaugural Emerging Writer Fellow in Poetry GABRIEL RAMIREZ (2021) returns to the Magic City with his debut poetry collection, If Pit Bulls Had a God, It’d Be a Pit Bull, which examines how violent prejudices can be met with and redirected by a holy tenderness. After two years of artistic silence, Bluff is DANEZ SMITH’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet in the wake of the pandemic and protest following the murder of George Floyd in their hometown of the Twin Cities.…

The poems in Bound by JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY seek to carve a space in the world for Blackness and queerness that isn’t defined by trauma or lack, where Black and queer folks can create and conjure the worlds they want to live and love in. In Mammal: Sacrifice Is Not a Virtue, ANA MARÍA CABALLERO examines how one’s desire to view the self as in control opposes one’s many emotional hungers and the animalistic need for survival. Buy Bound – Arriola-Headley Buy Mammal: Sacrifice Is Not a Virtue – Caballero  …

Former U.S. Poet Laureate ROBERT PINSKY reads from his latest book and discusses the role of poetry in the community. In Proverbs of Limbo, he mines and maps limbal regions both demographic and personal – clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and culture – and all the countless variations of in-between. Moderated by poet CAMPBELL MCGRATH. Buy Fever of Unknown Origin: Poems – McGrath Buy Proverbs of Limbo  – Pinsky…

Join the Academy of American Poets for a 90th anniversary reading and conversation featuring JOY CASTRO and CARLIE HOFFMAN, highlighting questions of national identity, migration, displacement, and belonging. Castro offers readers an intimate glimpse into the history of early 20th-century Cuban émigré society in Key West through Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West, a bilingual edition of Feliciano Castro’s poetry. Hoffman’s When There Was Light maps out a topography across Eastern Europe and America where global movements of diaspora and war live alongside personal reckonings,…

KATHIE KLARREICH founded the Miami-based prison writing nonprofit Exchange for Change in 2014, after a 24-year career as a journalist. Don’t Shake the Spoon: A Journal of Prison Writing is a collection of Exchange for Change students’ stories, poems, and essays. Joining Klarreich are contributors to the anthology, JORGE CUESTA, WENDY HINSHAW, and MARIE PETIT-LOUIS.…

Join us to celebrate 75 years of the National Book Awards and be a part of Team Book history! For more than a decade, the Miami Book Fair and National Book Foundation have joined together to present the biggest in-person showcase of National Book Award honorees anywhere in the country. 2024 honored authors across all five National Book Award categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature) will share rapid-fire readings from their recognized works and be interviewed by the National Book Foundation’s executive director,…

Venezuelan poet NIDIA HERNÁNDEZ bridges the gulf between her two countries in The Farewell Light,leaping effortlessly between the natural world and meditations on culture, family, language, and longing. Translator-poet FARID MATUK presents The Hormone of Darkness, curated from Peruvian poet and multimedia artist Tilsa Otta’s body of work – in which a queer Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule answers these conditions by doubling down on a life force that precedes and exceeds notions of the poetic.…

JENNIFER MARITZA MCCAULEY’s Kinds of Grace: Poems explores the complicated facets of Blackness and Afro-Latinidad, mental health issues, womanhood, and the power of healing racial wounds. The Blue Mimes: Poems by SARA DANIELE RIVERA investigates catastrophic grief – from the pandemic to the present, from Albuquerque to Lima to Havana, between the rifts in communion that afford the possibility to heal. EMILY JUNGMIN YOON’s Find Me as the Creature I Am: Poems holds up a mirror to humanity to show that we are animals,…

La poeta nacida en Uruguay SILVIA GOLDMAN presenta Lo que se hereda es la orfandad. Las venezolanas NIDIA HERNÁNDEZ y JHANAYRA MANZANO llegan con el poemario bilingüe Farewell Light y el volumen La sombra del cuervo, respectivamente. Las autoras conversarán con el poeta cubano ORLANDO GONZÁLEZ ESTEVA. Compra The Farewell Light – Hernandez Compra La sombra del cuervo – Manzano…

Join KWAME ALEXANDER – poet, educator, publisher, Emmy Award-winning producer, and No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of 40 books – as he reads from and discusses his two most recent projects. This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets is a breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time. Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances is an intimate and nontraditional (or “new-fashioned”) memoir featuring poetry,…

DIANNELY ANTIGUA’s Good Monster presents a raw and innovative poetry collection that navigates themes of trauma, chronic pain, and mental illness. MERLE COLLINS’ Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings offers a poetic exploration of Little’s life, intertwining historical narrative with the power of imagination to illuminate a figure often overshadowed by her famous son. GEOFFREY PHILP’s graphic novel My Name is Marcus introduces readers to Marcus Garvey,…

Former U.S. Poet Laureate BILLY COLLINS reads from his latest book and discusses the role of poetry in the community. In Water, Water, he combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight and capture the beauties and ironies of everyday experience in 60 new poems. Moderated by ROBERT CASPER, head of poetry and literature at the Library of Congress. Buy Water, Water: Poems – Collins…

The National Book Foundation’s National Book Awards recognizes some of the most outstanding poetry collections published in the U.S. each year. Join us for a special discussion featuring this year’s nominees. Moderated by RUTH DICKEY, executive director of the National Book Foundation. Buy Silver: Poems – Phillips Buy The Book of Wounded Sparrows: Poems – Quintanilla Buy mother – RedCherries Buy Liontaming in America – Willis    …

Like a tree growing from concrete, these three stories celebrate resilience in the face of adversity that comes with growing up. In NADINE PINEDE’s poignant novel-in-verse When the Mapou Sings, teenage Lucille’s life is uprooted by sudden changes and the disappearance of a friend, but she finds strength and guidance in her roots – the Haitian mapou trees. In SAMUEL TEER and MAR JULIA’s graphic novel Brownstone, a young woman grapples with her identity in a neighborhood that thinks,…

MARIE HOWE’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. New and Selected Poems is an essential volume that draws from each of her four previous collections – including What the Living Do, a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award-longlistedMagdalene, a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood – and contains 20 new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or musing on aging, Howe is “a light-bearer,…

La poeta cubana MARÍA CRISTINA GARRIDO sufre actualmente una condena de 7 años en prisiones cubanas por manifestarse pacíficamente el 11 de julio de 2021, en su pueblo, pidiendo “libertad” para Cuba. Su hermana presenta una colección de poemas escritos sin el permiso de sus carceleros, increíblemente libres y llenos de claridad y calidad, que están enumerados llevando el conteo del día de encarcelamiento en que cada texto fue escrito, y que dieron el salto desde el abismo del calabozo y la impuesta muerte social,…

In All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins, ARIEL FRANCISCO mourns a Miami already ruined by climate change and development, and weaves an elegy to a city in existential limbo. JEN KARETNICK’s Inheritance with a High Error Rate considers how the Floridian landscape itself is both mind and body, bearing witness to catastrophe, endurance, and the many ways we nourish hope like a habit. The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983-2023 spans DAVID KIRBY’s career,…

Presentación del libro Agua sagrada, de RUBÍ ARANA en su versión bilingüe, con el cual se dará un homenaje póstumo a su vida y obra. Con la participación de escritores cercanos a la poeta nicaragüense que compartirán sus poemas y anécdotas más preciadas, entre ellos LIDIA CARABALLO, BEATRIZ MENDOZA CORTISSOZ, ALEJANDRA FERRAZZA, KELLY MARTINEZ GRANDALL, GLORIA MILÁDELAROCA, DANILO LÓPEZ ROMÁN, STACEY ALBA SKAR-HAWKINS,…

The 2024 National Book Award-honored authors in Young People’s Literature visit Miami Book Fair to share more about their books and answer questions from Miami-Dade County’s middle and high school students acting as journalists. Hosted by JOHNNIE CHRISTMAS, authors include OLIVIA A. COLE, JOSH GALARZA, ERIN ENTRADA KELLY, ANGELA SHANTÉ, and ALI TERESE! For more information and to RSVP, contact Rachel Gil de Gibaja at rgildegi@mdc.edu.…