Creating Cultural Miami = Priceless
Support the Miami Book Fair and be part of Miami's commitment to expanding and strengthening Miami's literary culture.
National and presidential poet laureates. Iconic and emerging voices that cross cultures and experiences. Reflections on pain and resilience. Prose that provokes, soothes, and empowers. Welcome to poetry at Miami Book Fair.
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,…
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,…
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.…
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,…
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…
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,…
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.…
Celebrating Latino Poetry: The Library of America’s Anthology with special programming during Miami Book Fair week, Lit Encounters is a special exhibition presented by MAD ARTS in partnership with digital poetry gallery THEVERSEVERSE that brings one of humanity’s most enduring forms of expression into the museum space as the main event! Gathering writers, visual artists, and code poets, the exhibition reimagines the bounds of how poetry is experienced via a multiplicity of mediums and technologies,…
Three distinct Jamaican voices, each contributing unique perspectives on race, identity, and memory. GEOFFREY PHILP creates powerful verse in Archipelagos that reflects the struggles of the Caribbean in a world facing global disasters and societal inequities. DALE MAHFOOD’s When Trees Fall: Book One of the Wood and Water Saga delves into secrets, love, and the quest for paternal approval against the backdrop of historical political change in Jamaica. And SAFIYA SINCLAIR‘s How to Say Babylon: A Memoir provides a profound exploration of Jamaican identity in a shifting cultural and social landscape.…
This reading honors the life and work of award-winning poet, professor, and LGBTQ+ activist Maureen Seaton (October 20, 1947 – August 26, 2023), author of more than two dozen solo and collaborative books, who touched the lives of so many in Miami and beyond through her poetry, teaching, and kindness. Hosted by poets DENISE DUHAMEL and NICOLE TALLMAN, this tribute gathers a group of local poets to read their favorite poems from Seaton’s expansive collection in memory and celebration of her remarkable literary accomplishments.…
Join us for a special conversation with Miami-Dade County Poet Laureate RICHARD BLANCO and his friend, mentor, and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow CAMPBELL MCGRATH. In Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems, Blanco has collected more than 100 poems from his previous books that represent his evolution as a writer grappling with identity, love, the idea of “home,” and ultimately art itself. McGrath’s Fever of Unknown Origin: Poems considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction,…
In Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, KATIE FARRIS questions and praises the body even as it deteriorates in a gut-wrenching battle with cancer, affirming sensuality despite physical scars. JANINE JOSEPH’s Decade of the Brain: Poems articulates the strangeness of living in relation to other past and simultaneous selves changed by injury, intimacy, notions of citizenship, and nation. BRIAN TURNER’s unique trilogy – The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem,…
ENA COLUMBIÉ presenta una selección exquisita de sus cuentos, ALEJANDRO ROBLES llega con un volumen de microrrelatos sobre la figura del dragón, y LENA YAU ofrece una colección de poemas que parten de un sabor, un olor o un espacio. Los autores conversarán con el poeta, periodista y editor GERMÁN GUERRA. Compra Cabrón. – Columbié Compra Gabinete de dragones. – Robles Compra Trae tu espalda para hacer mi mesa. – Yau Compra Hormigas en la lengua.…
RACHEL DEWOSKIN’s absolute animal finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, the ancient and the contemporary, inviting us to consider what holds life, what lasts, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human. In Romantic Comedy, JAMES ALLEN HALL creates liberatory narratives, whether grieving a father’s death, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting a 1980s crime thriller. Formally and acoustically attuned,…
Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022 traces the evolution of MAJOR JACKSON’s transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes across two decades of writing. This collection offers a sustained portrait of a poet “bound up in the ecstatic,” whose buoyant lyricism confronts the social and political forces that would demean humanity. In August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed Black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil,…
Join Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate and author of Bloodpaths SATURN BROWNE and Montgomery County Youth Poet Laureate EVAN WANG for a reading and conversation, moderated by South Florida Youth Poet Ambassador and Speak Up Student Ambassador CAITLIN VILLACRUSIS, on sharpening one’s craft within the teen poetry community, developing the individual voice in contest cycles, and succeeding publicly while failing privately. Speak Up, a free, year-round creative writing workshop series for teens ages 13-19, is a program of Miami Book Fair.…
In Two Open Doors in a Field, a profusion of sonnets rises from SOPHIE KLAHR’s bond with Nebraska and the experience of driving thousands of miles alone while listening to the radio, where unexpected landscapes make listening to the unexpected more acute. NICOLE TALLMAN’s Poems for the People and Fersace are both a refreshing and honest Michigan-meets-Miami handling of hard topics that adjust to the changing world around her, seeking solace in conversations with the dead and living (including herself),…
A special event featuring many of this year’s honorees, including NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, AALIYAH BILAL, ERIN BOW, KENNETH M. CADOW, OLIVER DE LA PAZ, ELIOT DUNCAN, JONATHAN EIG, CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA, HUDA FAHMY, STÊNIO GARDEL, ANNELYSE GELMAN, VASHTI HARRISON, TANIA JAMES,…
MAHOGANY L. BROWNE’s Chrome Valley: Poems offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America, capturing the pleasures and pangs of young love and motherhood, and reveling in the beauty of the undaunted self-determination passed down from Black woman to Black woman. The poems in CHEN CHEN’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency: Poems a acknowledge and name the persistent threat of violence, while also reminding its reader of joys both small and large: West Texas sunsets,…
In Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky, RUDY FRANCISCO explores poetic forms such as the contrapuntal, golden shovel, and the ode to inspire readers, expose them to different avenues of approaching the act of writing poetry, and invite them to try it for themselves. Moderated by South Florida Youth Poet Ambassador and Speak Up Student Ambassador CAITLIN VILLACRUSIS. Buy Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky. – Francisco …
La autora, traductora y crítica mexicana CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA presenta sus nuevas obras: El invencible verano de Liliana, una crónica sobre el femicidio de su hermana; Turbar la quietud. Gestos subversivos entre fronteras, obra editada junto a GISELA HEFFES acerca del trabajo de autoras de habla hispana, y Me llamo cuerpo que no está, un volumen con su poesía reunida. Rivera Garza y Heffes conversarán con el periodista ÓSCAR MOLINA V., primer participante del Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships Program en español.…
A special event with OLIVER DE LA PAZ, The Diaspora Sonnets; ANNELYSE GELMAN, Vexations; JOSÉ OLIVAREZ, Promises of Gold; PAISLEY REKDAL, West: A Translation; CHARIF SHANAHAN, Trace Evidence: Poems; EVIE SHOCKLEY, suddenly we; and MONICA YOUN, From From: Poems; moderating is RUTH DICKEY, National Book Foundation executive director. Buy The Diaspora Sonnets. – De La Paz Buy Vexations.…
Fire Index: Poems by BETHANY BREITLAND measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion, reckoning with her complicit, and often dishonest life to demand her full attention, forgiveness, and responsibility. Drawing its title from the 1863 federal act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, Removal Acts: Poems by ERIN MARIE LYNCH reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence, assembling an intimate record of recovery from bulimia and insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide.…
In her 14th poetry collection, Homelight: Poems, LOLA HASKINS remembers poets who preceded her, from Sappho to Blake to Merwin, before turning to the arrogance of the way we treat the planet and each other, and finally considering death in the form of tributes to lost friends and her own preparations to follow them. In The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, MICHAEL HETTICH presents selections from more than two dozen books spanning five decades,…
Join four Florida-rooted editors and writers for an industry talk about how to take any community-centered literary project – anthology, creative arts publication, food culture, and more – from start to finish. Featuring DUSTIN BROOKSHIRE, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology co-editor; GRAZIE SOPHIA CHRISTIE and GINEVRA LILY DAVIS, The Miami Native co-editors; SUANAY HERNANDEZ, UndrBelly editor; and JASMINE RESPESS, Islandia Journal literary editor.…
Una conversación entre la poeta BETTSIMAR DÍAZ, el escritor y poeta LEONARDO PADRÓN, el escritor CAMILO PINO y el editor GARCILASO PUMAR presentando la nueva propuesta cultural de Miami Beach.…
La Feria reúne a LOURDES VÁZQUEZ, LEGNA RODRÍGUEZ IGLESIAS, ONEYDA GONZÁLEZ, y ROSIE INGUANZO, un grupo de poetas que nos han acompañado a lo largo de los años, tres de ellos galardonados con el Premio Paz, en una lectura de celebración coordinada por CARLOS PINTADO.…
Support the Miami Book Fair and be part of Miami's commitment to expanding and strengthening Miami's literary culture.