Richmond Poetry Fest
Richmond Poetry Fest is an event co-created by VisArts staff and a group of former and current writers-in-residence! A celebration of poetry and community, Richmond Poetry Fest will include readings, workshops, activities for poets and artists of all ages, and vendors.
Richmond Poetry Fest is a FREE community event supported by the Carole Weinstein Endowment for Creative Writing.
Stay tuned for Richmond Poetry Fest 2025!
April 2024
Friday Night Reading:
6:30 – 8pm
An evening of Spoken Word performances by the Writer’s Den.
Saturday Festivities:
10am – 4pm
Readings: Featuring local poets, VisArts writing teachers and students, Poetry for Palestine, panel on publishing poetry, performance by Slam Champion Ayanna Florence + Drag Story hour with Richmond’s 2024 Best Drag Queen and founder of driveway drag, Michelle Livigne from 11-12 pm.
Activities: Black out poetry, paint chip poetry, screen-printing t-shirts and totes, button making and ekphrastic poems
Workshops: 7 FREE Workshops in poetry comics, songwriting, Japanese forms, spoken word, zine-making, and persona poems + poetry for absolute beginners. Classes for the day are already full, but, you can join the waitlist for Poetry Fest classes now!
Vendors: Richmond Zine Fest, Richmond Public Library, Poe Museum, James River Writers, Diode Editions, Lost Arcana Cards and Appomattox Regional Governor’s School (ARGS). Shop local with vendors such as Shelf Life Books, Just Seed and VisArts!
5:30 to 7:30pm
Closing Reading + Special Announcement – Richmond Poetry Fest will conclude with “I Love You and I Wanted,” a reading by local poets, at 5:30pm that will also feature an announcement of the new Poet Laureate by the City of Richmond.
Related Events/Classes:
Closely, We Drift is a collection of work from 13 artists participating in the Studio Access Residency at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Through exploring new mediums and building on the familiar, this exhibition reflects each artists’ relationship to the flow state. Visit the Studio Access Resident Exhibition page on the VisArts website to learn more.
About the Writing Program at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond: The VisArts writing program offers classes as diverse and vibrant as our student population with coursework for writers at all stages, from beginner to advanced. Classes cover a range of creative writing topics from poetry to fiction to memoir to screenwriting and are offered in flexible formats from short weekend workshops to 8-week classes. Thanks to VisArts diverse programming and studios, we have the unique ability to combine visual arts and writing to offer classes that can be welcoming to both writers and visual artists, like Sewetry, Embroidered poems—a class combining poetry and embroidery. We’re proud of the long history of writing classes at VisArts and that we’ve grown to be a hub for writers wishing to learn and practice their craft.