Press release here:
It’s time for Asheville Wordfest, Asheville’s poetry festival. Between Tuesday May 2 and Sunday May 8, Asheville residences and guests can enjoy poetry events and readings around the city.
Asheville Wordfest is the product of a conversation among poets Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond, Jeff Davis and James Nave in 2007. In 2008, Wordfest launched at UNCA. Director Hope-Gill expected “maybe forty people, but by the end of the weekend, more than ten times that many had come to the events.”
Wordfest is a local festival created to bring the Asheville community together while also connecting it with global voices. Each year, Wordfest explores a theme, using poetry as a form of citizen journalism and not just as a Fine Art. This year’s theme is Resilience as Wordfest fixes the wide lens of poetry on the many ways that poetry acts as an agent of absorbing and moving with change when life changes.
The 2011 festival begins on Tuesday May 3 with a screening of local film-maker Paul Bonesteel’s ten-year project The Day Sandburg Died. Sandburg’s poetry celebrates the resilience of the American people. Screenings are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and 1 p.m. on Saturday at the Fine Arts Theater at Biltmore Avenue.
Further exercising the local-national focus of Wordfest, on Wednesday May 4 at 6 p.m. Biltmore Farms hosts a Wordfest Reception at the Hilton Hotel in Biltmore Park followed by performances by Keith Flynn and the Holy Men and Quincy Troupe. Quincy Troupe penned his memoir of his close friendship with Miles Davis in Miles and Me and has published collections and anthologies (including an anthology of third world writing) that have won him international acclaim.
Asheville-area poets Landon Godfrey, Holly Iglesias, Luke Hankins, Rose McLarney, Mendy Knott and Britt Kaufman all have new collections published. They will read at Asheville Wordfest.
Other poets at the festival: Kwame Dawes, Paul Guest, Brian Turner, Linda Hogan, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.
To bring the city’s youth into this dreaming fold, Wordfest will feature young poets at all the readings and include a highlights reading from the WORDslam, a poetry slam that will take place during the months leading up to Wordfest in Buncombe County schools.