Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY (2026)

05/30/2026

On Monday, June 1, Layli Long Soldier, alongside Mahogany L. Browne, Camille T. Dungy, and Naomi Shihab Nye, will lead us in the 28th Poetry Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, ending in a feast of poetry and fine food in Dumbo. Ahead of her reading, Long Soldier shared from her forthcoming book, We (Graywolf Press, 2026), and spoke with Poets House about visual resonance and her appreciation for community in New York City and among poets. Read the full interview here: https://poetshouse.org/interview-layli-long-soldier/

05/30/2026

Remote 6-Week Workshop: Michael Klein: Days of Wonder: Reading & Writing the Ecstatic Remote | 6 Saturdays | Jun 6 - Jul 11 | 1 - 3pm ET

Days of Wonder: Reading & Writing the Ecstatic

This reading-intensive, writing-focused poetry workshop will look at matters of the spirit, soul, or inner life—however we may define the human (humane?) mechanism at work when facing huge joy or huge dread in this world and in imagined worlds. How do we, as writers, face the kind of work that is at once essential and complex in an intimate and personal way? What does it mean for the length of that particular work? We will look at both long-ish poems and short poems to see how breadth or a compressed sensibility necessitates a deliberate and measured way of taking in the world. Readings will include Louise Glück, Jack Gilbert, Lucille Clifton, Gerald Stern, Nazim Hikmet, Franz Wright, Jean Valentine, and others.

6 Saturdays | June 6 – July 11 | 1 – 3pm ET | $360 ($320 for members)
(Jun 6, 13, 20, 27, Jul 4, 11)

Remote workshops will take place on Zoom. Sign up at the link in our bio! https://poetshouse.org/event/workshop-michael-klein-days-of-wonder/

05/27/2026

On Thursday, June 18, 7-9pm Poets House hosts a reading of poets Kaur Alia Ahmed, Gwen Aube, Cat Fitzpatrick, and Chariot Wish, whose new collections on gender, desire, and community, push the narrative, musical, and absurd to new heights.

RSVP here: https://poetshouse.org/event/new-works-kaur-alia-ahmed-gwen-aube-cat-fitzpatrick-chariot-wish/

05/26/2026

Join us under summer sunsets once again for Summer Nights, an event series where poetry meets live music in Battery Park City. Each Friday night performance pairs electric readings from poets with a multigenre musical performances, all staged in picturesque Wagner Park, just steps from the Hudson River.

June 5- Poets Kinsale Drake, author of The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press, 2024); Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018); and musician Miriam Elhajli.
https://poetshouse.org/event/summer-nights-poetry-music-park-drake-hayes/

July 17- Poets Yaissa Jiménez, Eileen Myles, and indie musician Samantha Crain who won three NAMMYs (Native American Music Awards).
https://poetshouse.org/event/summer-nights-poetry-music-eileen-myles-jimenez-crain/

August 21- Poets Safia Elhillo, Jenny Xie, and Sudanese rapper Nadine El Roubi whose music has been characterized as neo-soul and hip-hop.
https://poetshouse.org/event/summer-nights-poetry-music-safia-elhillo-jenny-xie/

05/26/2026

Remote 6-Week Workshop: Leah Umansky: How to Live a Creative Life
| 6 Tuesdays | Jun 2 - Jul 7 | 6 - 8pm ET

In her book Upstream, Mary Oliver writes: “we are lambs and are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.” We are all the things, and part of living a creative life is to know you are one small part of the great wide world. Anyone can live a creative life. You are probably already doing it now! Creativity starts with seeing, looking and observing. In this course, we will explore the many ways creativity can become a part of our daily lives. We will explore readings from Mary Oliver, Suleika Jaouad, Maggie Smith, Sue Monk Kidd, David Lynch, Rick Rubin and more. Participants will use these texts to journal, to write poems, and to think about what the creative life can actually look like—and appreciate the fact that there is no one way!

Sign up at the link: https://poetshouse.org/event/workshop-leah-umansky-creative-life/

05/23/2026

Poet As Witness: Central American Counterpoetics. In-Person & Streaming on Zoom | Thursday | May 28 | 7-9pm

Within the already esoteric window of contemporary Latin American poetics, there lies one of the smallest yet perhaps most significant epicenters for counter-poetics — Central America.

Join us next Thursday for the latest installment of our Poet as Witness series, which will give voice to only a few contemporaries working either within this diverse region or within its diaspora.

Copies of books will be available for sale. RSVP at the link in our bio!

05/23/2026

"I was astonished again reading about this June Jordan, this young mother, activist, escaping one night a week to look at pictures of spoons at the Donnell Library—that very library I first found her book in—because they were beautiful.” -Donna Masini on June Jordan

Revisit Donna Masini's 2007 talk on June Jordan, a poet Masini counts as a “major force in [her] life and a dear friend," in Poets House's digital archive.

poetshouse.org/masinis-love-for-jordan-archive

On May 26, Masini will read from her new book, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? (W. W. Norton, 2026) alongside Anne Marie Macari, Michael Klein, and Jacqueline Waters for Poets House's New Works Series.

New Works: Anne Marie Macari, Donna Masini, Michael Klein and Jacqueline Waters
In-Person & Streaming on Zoom | Tue | May 26 | 7-9pm

From the surreal edges of everyday experience in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?, to the deeply personal and politically resonant elegies of Amerigun: Poems, to the urgent, devotional impulse found in Happiness Ruined Everything, to the sinister yet comical scenes from 21st-century America depicted in The Fry, this program offers an opportunity to question and dismantle operating systems while offering solace through language, humor and the sacredness of the ordinary.

RSVP here: https://poetshouse.org/event/new-works-anne-marie-macari-donna-masini-michael-klein-and-jacqueline-waters/

05/19/2026

"I think a lot about the time we're in and how every day is a kind of revision of personal history." -Joy Harjo

Ahead of tomorrow's Passwords talk, explore readings from Joy Harjo and Jake Skeets from Poets House's digital archive.

https://poetshouse.org/from-the-archive-joy-harjos-luminosity/

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, Poets House has digitized audio and video recordings for hundreds of its programs, providing access to all through the new, searchable library catalog. In recordings from 2003 and 2020, hear iconic poems from Skeets and Harjo and listen as they share about the places that shape their poems

In-Person & Zoom | Wednesday | May 20 | 7-9pm

In this edition of Passwords, Jake Skeets focuses on Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s recursive structures, accumulative sequencing, and long architectures names the poem as a site of futurity. Skeets will explore how repetition becomes a practice of time, generating methods of return and possibility by conjuring not only what has been, but what might yet be.

This event is presented with generous support from the Battery Park City Authority.
Talk in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.
Also streamed on Zoom with link sent out day of the event.

RSVP at the link in the bio!

05/13/2026

In-Person 3-Hour Workshop: Michelle Phương Hồ: The Ongoing & the Prose Poem | Saturday | Jun 13 | 12 - 3pm

How can a poem behave like a letter, a diary, a chronicle, or a study of all that is exhausting and inexhaustible? How do writers approach ongoing crises, aches, and longings that exceed the neatness of conventional poetic frames and confound our usual ways of making sense of the world? What if, when we reach the end of a line—or the end of reason, or the end of hope—we allow our language to spill and fill the field of a page? Prose poems offer a mode to explore such overwhelm—those feelings, conditions, and experiences that have no discrete outline, no singular cause, no foreseeable end. In this generative workshop, we’ll study the work of Cameron Awkward-Rich, Solmaz Sharif, Jennifer S. Cheng, Richard Siken, Bhanu Kapil, and/or Claudia Rankine and write prose poems of our own.

Sign up here: https://poetshouse.org/event/workshop-michelle-phuong-ho-ongoing-prose-poem/

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