It's hard to believe that The New York City Poetry Festival is now entering its 5th year! It feels like just yesterday that we started this festival with nothing but a vision of a peaceful and pastoral weekend of poetry that unified the many factions of the poetry community. Perhaps we need that now more than ever. Since 2011 the Festival has become a fixture in the cultural calendar of this great city. Poets from all five boroughs and beyond have grown accustomed to looking for this event to punctuate the apex of their summers in the city.

The 5th Annual New York City Poetry Festival will be held on Governors Island's Colonel's Row on July 25th and 26th, 2015.  The Poetry Society of New York, producers of The Poetry Brothel, The Typewriter Project, and the Ear Inn Series, once again invite attendees to come together for this free, two-day festival to celebrate New York City's vibrant poetry community.

This year we will welcome back more than 75 New York City poetry groups, including venerable institutions, upstarts, small presses, local reading series, literary journals, high school poetry teams, and more to The Festival’s three stages. If year’s past are any indication, over 250 poets will present, and we've already booked some incredible headliners: Nick Flynn, Patricia Spears Jones, David Matlin, and Fran Quinn!!

This year also welcomes back our Vendors Village packed with local artisans, literary journals, and small presses, as well as The Festival’s Ring of Daisies Open-Mic, which is often the hottest mic on Governor’s Island. And The Children’s Poetry Festival, this year sponsored by Writopia Lab, will give our youngest festival attendees a chance to encounter the magic that brought us all to poetry in the first place.

As always, the purpose of the New York City Poetry Festival has been to liberate poets and their work from the dark corners of bars, bookstore, and coffee shops and their halogen-lit college campuses, and to bring together as many NYC poets as possible, in the bright light of day, to meet, mingle, and collaborate. Fostering an open, approachable, diverse, innovative, sharp, and culturally prominent literary community lies at the core of The Poetry Society of New York's mission. While there are still a few entrenched poetry establishments, for many writers and artists, and even the general public, they can seem remote and inaccessible; The Poetry Society of New York aims not only to bridge these gaps, but to unify this city's poetry community in ways never before thought possible.

By opening doors to diverse and unique artistic interactions, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye. The New York City Poetry Festival has been honored to present such award-winning writers as Mark Strand, Paul Muldoon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Smith, Mark Doty, Matthea Harvey, Dorothea Lasky, and Cornelius Eady, but more importantly the festival has given poets and poetry lovers from all five boroughs and beyond an opportunity to hear, appreciate, and interact with poets whom they might never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. The festival has also presented over 50 artists of other mediums. By reaching outside the established poetry communities, The Poetry Society of New York hopes to create new audiences for poetry and facilitate collaborations between poets and other artists. Similarly, by reaching out to colleges, high schools, grade schools, and children's poetry organizations, the festival hopes to encourage, educate, and inspire fledgling writers of all ages to become a part of New York's diverse and dynamic poetry scene.

This year's festival planning is already going strong, and we will make announcements here over the next few weeks. So, donate today to stay up-to-date on the lineup and other featured activities! Thank you so much for supporting The Poetry Society of New York in its production of the 5th Annual New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island. Contributors can take great pride and deep pleasure in this gathering—the largest, most participatory poetry festival in the world—which belongs to New York City. With your help the festival will flourish in 2015 and continue to grow in size, quality, and acclaim in the years to come.