Poetry & Shelter

The Poetry Coalition, an alliance of nearly thirty independent poetry organizations across the United States, is presenting a series of programs and publications in the summer of 2025 inspired by the theme: Poetry & Shelter.

Learn more below about programming offered by member organizations across the country, and join us or follow along: #PoetryandShelter #PoetryCoalition.

Since 2016, the Poetry Coalition's annual programming has reached millions of individuals each year, highlighting poetry’s transformative impact on individuals and communities.

Academy of American Poets

To celebrate National Translation Month in September, the Academy of American Poets will commission new translations as part of its popular Poem-a-Day series. This special initiative aims to connect readers, poets, and translators, building community, refuge, and shelter in the many languages spoken across the United States.

subscribe to Poem-a-Day

Academy of American Poets

Alliance for Young Artists & Writers

The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers’ Class of 2024 National Student Poets will collaborate on a poem centered around the theme of Poetry & Shelter. This poem will be performed during the 2025 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards national celebration week in June in New York City, and will also be shared across the Alliance’s social media channels.

Asian American Writers' Workshop

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop will present programming beginning through the summer that explores the theme of Poetry & Shelter through the lenses of memory, haunting, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma and resistance.

Programs include an in-person celebration of Sarah Aziza's debut memoir The Hollow Half, performances by Margins fellows at the New York City Poetry Festival, a joint event with poets Cathy Linh Che and Mia Ayumi Malhotra, and a reading by artist and poet Jenna Hamed from her book Moving Towards Home: Art for Palestine.

Additionally, a generative workshop led by poets Kiran Bath and Megan Pinto will explore the emotional and ethical terrain of writing about the people we love, examining questions of consent, self-disclosure, and form as shelter.

Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque will commission three poets on the theme of Poetry & Shelter for the September installment of The NEW Series. Each installment of The NEW Series features wholly original work commissioned from three authors on a single theme, with the work presented to the public for the first time in Beyond Baroque's Wanda Coleman Theater in an evening of readings.

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

CantoMundo

"A cactus frame/ of your face in the middle/ because in the forest of my dreams// I lay in it and I'm living in it." —from "Round Dance Rain" by Amber McCrary

CantoMundo will host art and poetry workshops inspired by the theme of Poetry & Shelter. This hands-on community workshop will launch during CantoMundo’s annual three-day retreat at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, and continue in community settings through September.

CantoMundo

Dodge Poetry

“Poetry is a place where I don’t have to make concessions.” —José Felipe Ozuna

Dodge Poetry will partner with the Undocupoets to host Undocumented Futures, a virtual event in June, featuring past and current Undocupoets Fellowship recipients blu, Wo Chan, Claudia Rojas, and Georgia Russell. The event celebrates a decade of literary activism and the publication of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. The program will be hosted by Undocupoets co-organizers Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin.

Dodge Poetry Presents Undocumented Futures

Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po)

“Let us poem a place where you cannot erase us into white space.// Let us dig to remind ourselves our roots are ancestral/ and there is nothing deeper/ than these sacred, dirt-covered hands.” —from "Missing More Than a Word" by Tanaya Winder

In-Na-Po will host its fourth annual week-long retreat for emerging Native poets in July in New York City. Retreat faculty and fellows will explore various forms of essential shelter. Additionally, retreat participants will write poems engaging with visual art at the Museum of Modern Art, to create "Spirit Lines" that trace ancestral connections that nurture contemporary flourishing. We will share samples of that work in social media posts an on our website following the retreat.

Kundiman

Throughout September, Kundiman will host its 9th annual Postcard Poem Exchange, which aims to nurture and further the writing and reading of poetry within our daily lives and communities. This year’s exchange invites participants to write and share poems inspired by the lines from Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s "Something About Living”: “Love is a story/ we never tire of telling…// Love lives in many rooms.” Inspired by Poetry & Shelter, Kundiman fellows and community members will create and mail postcard poems that engage with this theme. Weekly photo recaps of the postcard creations will be shared online.

Lambda Literary

Lambda Literary will host Embodied Poetics: The Trans Body as Shelter, a 2-hour generative poetry workshop that will take place during the Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices in July. Participants will consider the relationship between poetry, body, and shelter, examining how the tradition of embodied poetics can take shape on the page, how their own body can work with poetry to provide shelter, and specifically the poetics of gender-diverse bodies and their ability to act as shelter when enabled to thrive.

Letras Latinas

Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, in partnership with Infrarrealista Review and Gemini Ink, will present Trans Poetica: A Pride Month Literary Plática, a reading and conversation featuring three trans Latine poets: Pushcart Prize-nominated Keagan Wheat; SG Huerta, author of Burns (Sundress Publications, 2026); and, Stalina Villarreal, Spanish translator and author of Watcha (Deep Vellum, 2024).

Moderated by 2025 Letras Latinas / Poetry Coalition Fellow Cloud Delfina Cardona, this San Antonio event will bring together writers from across Texas for an evening that centers trans Latine voices in a time of censorship and fear. Cardona, Wheat, Huerta, and Villarreal will read from their published works and engage in a conversation about craft, publishing, and their roles in the literary communities of Houston and San Marcos, TX. An audience Q&A will follow the discussion.

Letras Latinas

Mass Poetry

“Who am I to call myself citizen, and/ human and free? And who are you// to call yourself landed and grounded,/ and free. And who is judge enough?” —from “A Stateless Poem” by Danielle Legros Georges

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival returns to Salem, MA from May 30 to June 1, bringing together over 150 poets for readings, panels, workshops, performances, and more. Hosted by Mass Poetry, the 13th biennial Festival will feature poets Diannely Antigua, Marilyn Chin, Ross Gay, Saeed Jones, Keetje Kuipers, Danez Smith, and Felicia Zamora.

As the biggest poetry festival in New England, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival is committed to celebrating our common threads and to weaving worlds together by providing opportunities for writers to share their work, drawing people from different regions of the state and country to build community, harnessing the power of poetry to inspire collective care and imagine possibilities for social change. Programming themes at this year’s festival offer different kinds of shelter, where all people can find a home, including joy and play, environment, diversity in all forms, democracy and the voice of the people, as well as the art of poetry.

2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Mizna

Mizna will embrace the theme of Poetry and Shelter through a special journal release event for its forthcoming summer issue, bringing Arab/SWANA and larger Twin Cities communities together under one roof for a collective respite with poetry. “Mizna” is an Arabic word meaning “desert cloud,” connoting shade and rain, relief and shelter. This event will be a reviving, safe, and liberatory literary space, a vital reading by multiple local and regional writers featured in the issue.

Mizna - Poetry Coalition

O, Miami

O, Miami is presenting Soy de Todas Partes, a widespread civic publishing project that aims to install 100 resident poems across Miami-Dade County in celebration of the immigrant experience. Drawing from O, Miami’s robust archive, the project takes an acupuncture approach toward poetry as public art, rooted in the belief that poetry is a powerful tool for empathy and understanding. By partnering with local venues and enlisting the services of artists and tradespeople, O, Miami will engage our wider community of collaborators in executing the vision of this timely project, which celebrates the richness and vitality of Miami’s majority-minority community.

Soy de Todas Partes will expand to explore how shelter manifests within the immigrant experience—physically and emotionally. TThrough a Civic Publishing framework, Miami-Dade residents will be invited to reflect on the idea of shelter in all its forms: as a dream and a place of arrival. O, Miami will continue to highlight poems that speak to the ways South Florida continues to seek, create, and redefine shelter in a city shaped by immigration and resilience.

The Poetry Project

“take shelter from the falling/ temperatures/ take stock of the permanent rift then claim it/ the eddy does its little dervish/ take in all its conditions” —from “then take shelter” by Asiya Wadud

The Poetry Project will host a 10-session generative writing workshop this summer that addresses, either directly or more obliquely, the concept of shelter. The workshop, to be led by Asiya Wadud, will provide a space for collective thinking and writing around how such crises are manufactured, and what poetics can be forged to counter them.

In addition, writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts will lead a Deep Study session on the concept of the underground inspired by the work and life of Assata Shakur. At a time when many of our communities face direct threat and attack, we ask: can seeking shelter underground—in secrecy—serve as a means to regroup and forge new imaginaries, laying the groundwork for a different world?

Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation will sponsor writing workshops and community gatherings in September at autonomous sanctuary houses for LGBT immigrants and asylum-seekers in Chicago, IL, and Tucson, AZ.

Poetry Society of America

Through its Poems on Wheels program, the Poetry Society of America will print and distribute 60,000 copies of Natasha Trethewey's poem "Housekeeping" to Meals on Wheels clients in New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. Poems on Wheels, a partnership with Meals on Wheels chapters around the country, delivers poems along with nourishing meals to seniors who are homebound due to illness, age, or disability. The project speaks to the complexity of our notions of shelter, especially at a time when so many feel at risk outside their homes: the need for a safe space, but also the need for cultural connection.

Poets House

Poets House will present Summer Nights, a series of sunset shows in neighborhood parks along the Hudson River. Poets and musicians will join together in verse while sheltering in community, language, and shared artistry. Peter Gizzi, Ariana Reines, and Felukah will perform on July 18 at the Pavillion in Rockefeller Park. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Sofia Wolfson will perform on July 25 at the Pavillion in Rockefeller Park. And m.s. RedCherries, Danez Smith, and Speedy Ortiz will perform on August 8 at Wagner Park. All events are free and open to the public.

Poets House

Split This Rock

Split This Rock will host an in-person generative writing workshop in Washington, DC, and publish two new Poetry Writing Capsules, a video series and self-paced exploration that features a poet examining a topic within the broader theme of poetry for social change, discussing several poems, and sharing writing prompts. All capsules are free, captioned, recorded with ASL interpreters, and include a link to a document formatted for screen readers with supporting materials.

Split This Rock will also release an open call for submissions to its Poem of the Week Series. It will request poems that respond to the theme of Poetry & Shelter, to be published later in the calendar year.

Split This Rock

The University of Arizona Poetry Center

“Parecemos vivir en un mundo de mapas,/ pero en verdad vivimos en un mundo/ hecho no de papel ni de tinta,/ sino de gente. Esas líneas/ son nuestras vidas.”

“We seem to live in a world of maps,/ but in truth we live in a world/ made not of paper and ink,/ but of people. Those lines/ are our lives.”

—from "Lineas fronterizas / Border Lines" by Alberto Ríos

The University of Arizona Poetry Center will support The Sealey Challenge as its Poetry and Shelter program. The Sealey Challenge is one of the largest poetry reading initiatives in the world. Since its founding in 2017 by poet Nicole Sealey, The Sealey Challenge has nurtured tens of thousands of poetry readers around the globe by supporting a virtual poetry reading community each August.

Participants join the community by selecting a book of poems to read each day for the month of August (31 books in total), sharing their experiences on social media. This year, we encourage you to seek shelter—in whatever form that may take for you—in spending the month of August with a community of poetry readers through The Sealey Challenge.

Urban Word/National Youth Poet Laureate Program

This summer, Urban Word’s Youth Poets Laureate, a network of more than 100 cities, counties and states across the country, will examine the intersection of “home/land,” place, identity and safety. Youth Poets Laureate will create and submit original “poems of place and identity,” which will be published and showcased on an interactive map of the U.S., highlighting the movement’s national reach.This project will be led by former Pittsburg Youth Poet Laureate, Hallie Dong, and be facilitated through the Institute of Poetry & Praxis, a bi-weekly online master class for Youth Poets Laureate, led by Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows.

Wick Poetry Center

The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University will present The Nature of Our Times, a multifaceted project rooted in environmental justice, collective memory, and the poetic possibilities of refuge. This project and national series will include a book launch and lecture at Kent State University on September 18, followed by an evening reading at Last Exit Books in downtown Kent on September 19, featuring poets Aileen Cassinetto and Luisa Igloria—two voices whose work embodies resilience, sanctuary, and the living archive of shelter.

Drawing from the Wick Poetry Center’s The Nature of Our Times digital platform, which invites users to reflect on the intersections of climate, home, and personal story, our program celebrates the ways poetry can name, question, and protect the fragile ecosystems—internal and external—that define shelter.

This project reflects the Wick Poetry Center’s commitment to amplifying public voice through creative writing, digital tools, and meaningful partnerships with communities, artists, and scientists.

Woodland Pattern

"a letter in the/ past tense/ about the/ future is/ my latest/ time machine/ you should try it” —CAConrad

Woodland Pattern will present a program featuring poet CAConrad, with a focus on Poetry & Shelter for queer and trans people in Milwaukee and the surrounding region. CAConrad will join the community for a reading on September 20, and there will also be a celebration of a new installation of their poetry on the exterior of its building. A pamphlet of CA’s poems will be available free of cost to all in attendance at the event.

Woodland Pattern

Youth Speaks

"Home sounds like youth run this city/ Here there is no cost of living/ Only the cost of love" —from "Home" by Darius Parker

Youth Speaks is presenting the 28th Annual Brave New Voices (BNV) International Youth Poetry Festival in Madison, Wisconsin from July 16 to 19, 2025, in association with the First Wave Scholarship Program of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. BNV convenes the most outstanding and outspoken youth poets from around the world for 4 days of workshops, slams, showcases, community service, and civic participation events. Each year at the festival, thousands of local youth attend events, participate in workshops and become a part of the Youth Spoken word community. BNV ignites hope and bridges the global community through voice and power. It is the voice of the future; a brand of both hope and resistance.