PoetryFest Features Leading Student Poets from Each of the Five College Campuses

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The 17th Annual Five College PoetryFest will be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 20, in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry in Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. The event is free and open to the public.

PoetryFest celebrates the quality and range of student poetry with two writers representing, respectively, Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The inspiration of Lorna Peterson, former executive director of Five Colleges, Inc., and Ellen Doré Watson, former director of the Smith College Poetry Center, PoetryFest annually rotates among each of the five campuses.

“The Five College PoetryFest is always a banquet of surprises—with a huge range in styles, both personal and poetic,” says Watson. “It's a terrific celebration of the level of energy and craft going on in undergrad poetry in this valley.”

The participants this year are Eliza Brewer and Aqiil Gopee of Amherst; Olivia Caldwell and Blue Keller of Hampshire; Mars Early-Hubelbank and Ariana Sarmiento Fielding of Mount Holyoke; Ava Goga and Lucy Liu of Smith; and Courtney Janes and Vanan Phan of UMass. Each student will read for five minutes.

The reading will be followed by a reception and booklets of the students’ work will be available. For further information, contact Sue Dickman at (413) 542-4023.

This event is sponsored by the writing programs of the five campuses, the Poetry Center at Smith College and the Five College Consortium.