Over the last decade, many poets from North Carolina and beyond have participated in the West End Poetry Festival. Participants have included finalists for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Book Prize, the Oregon Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize; recipients of fellowships Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; and too many other accolades to easily list here.
Festival Themes 2012 to Present
- 2012—Fresh Picked Poetry
- 2013 Poetry and Nature
- 2014 Poetry of Place
- 2015 Tenth Anniversary: Celebrations, Milestones and Marking Time in Poetry
- 2016 Poetry and Healing
- 2017 Poetry of Resistance
- 2018 Intersections
- 2019 Citizen poet: Work and Reconciliation
- 2020 Poetry for a Change
- 2021 United Poetry Service
- 2022 Music in Poetry
Participants have also included poets at the beginning of their writing career with few, if any, publishing credits. The festival aims to be broadly representative of poets and poetry.
Some programs from the most recent festivals are available as PDFs
2020 West End Poetry Festival (pdf unavailable)
2019 West End Poetry Festival (pdf unavailable)
2017 West End Poetry Festival (pdf unavailable)
