People in Dallas are hungry for poetry,” says Mag Gabbert, the city’s poet laureate. “There’s so much demand for participating in events, for offering workshops, for educating folks in different contexts across the city, and for bringing these kinds of public art initiatives and celebratory initiatives that people can participate in.” Other Dallasites agree. And at a time when literary arts organizations across the United States are struggling for funding, an expanding constellation of partnerships in Dallas is supporting bold investments in poetry. A substantial addition to the lineup launched this April, when Dallas-based literary organization and nonprofit publishing house Deep Vellum announced that it would be publishing ten new poetry collections each year, under the banner Central Track Poetry, in collaboration with Southern Methodist University’s Project Poëtica.
An event at Deep Vellum Bookstore, where Project Poëtica will sponsor poetry events. (Credit: Jessica Waffles)
Project Poëtica has committed to sponsoring all of Deep Vellum’s poetry events at the press’s bookstore and throughout the city. Will Evans, the founder of Deep Vellum, describes the new contributions of Project Poëtica as “a complete unicorn”—a unique sharing of resources between Southern Methodist University (SMU) and nonprofit organizations in Dallas that promises to foster literary community locally and beyond. The new Central Track Poetry series will feature both English-language originals and works in translation. Its first two titles were published in June: Hera Lindsay Bird’s Juvenilia and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s TERROR COUNTER.
Central Track Poetry is just the latest poetry venture Project Poëtica has committed to funding since its official launch in March 2024. The project’s founding director, David Caplan, the Daisy Deane Frensley Chair in English Literature at SMU, describes a twofold mission for Project Poëtica fueled by interdisciplinary, interorganizational partnerships: help make SMU an international hub of English language poetry and support the thriving local scene of bookstores, publishing houses, and, of course, writers and readers in Dallas.
Before announcing Central Track Poetry, Project Poëtica launched a partnership in November 2024 with Bridwell Press, a publishing endeavor of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology, to establish three new poetry series, which will release four or five books combined annually. One series, headed by Katie Condon, assistant professor of English at SMU, solicits new work by authors who have published at least one book of poetry already. Condon’s series debuted in March, with I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated by Luisa Muradyan. Two more series with Bridwell, both of which are open for submissions annually in May, are edited by Caplan: a line of creative and scholarly nonfiction books on poetics and a series dedicated to collaborative writing. The first title in the collaborative series is actually two books in one, Caplan says: Tilt / Beautiful People is composed of a selection of collaborative poems by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, who died in 2023, paired with a selection of collaborative poems by Seaton and Aaron Smith.
“When Maureen and I first started writing collaborative poems in the nineties, there wasn’t much appetite in the publishing world for collaborative poetry books,” Duhamel says, reflecting on the genre. “Their time has come!”
Just published in September is Spotted Ponies, an anthology of collaborative zines by poets Mag Gabbert, Chen Chen, Tarfia Faizullah, Leila Chatti, and Carly Joy Miller. When Gabbert was looking for a publisher, her vision of a large, full-color hardback edition had made it too expensive for most poetry presses to produce. Then Project Poëtica stepped in. Gabbert praises Project Poëtica for recognizing that poetry composed in the spirit of playfulness and collaboration holds value for readers. The print copies of Bridwell books will be sold at cost; digital editions are free.
These homegrown literary offerings have fed new collaborations. Independent bookstore and bar The Wild Detectives presents live events, including the monthly poetry reading series and podcast Inner Moonlight, hosted and produced by poet Logen Cure. The bookstore also hosts events for the U.K.-based Hay Festival’s annual Dallas Forum; Project Poëtica has become the lead cosponsor in bringing the Hay’s literary lineup to Dallas. The Writer’s Garret, another local literary organization, featured Joy Harjo in a marquee conversation as part of its Dallas Is Lit! festival in May, with Project Poëtica acting as a cosponsor. Deep Vellum, meanwhile, has worked closely with the Dallas Public Library and the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture to launch Dallas’s poet laureateship—the office Gabbert now holds. On July 31, the Academy of American Poets named Gabbert on its national list of poet laureate fellows. The fellowship will sponsor her “Sidewalk Poetry Project,” which will see poems by Dallas locals stamped onto the sidewalk at historically significant locations around the city.
Project Poëtica’s other contributions to this spate of local programming include the SMU Symposium on Poetic Form, which is free to attend and brings together poets, critics, and editors; poet Jericho Brown and critic Jonathan Culler were the keynote speakers in 2024. The next iteration will be held on February 23 and 24, 2026, with Ada Limón the keynote poet and Anahid Nersessian the keynote scholar. Outside of poetry, Project Poëtica’s partnership with the academic journal English Literary History and the literary magazine the Hopkins Review will match literary fiction writers with scholars for readings, conversation, and publication.
At Southwest Review, the literary quarterly housed at SMU, editor in chief Greg Brownderville and production manager and contributing writer Hannah Smith both emphasize that part of what makes Dallas such an inviting literary scene is its lack of hierarchy. “The lit scene is being led by the people out in the city,” Brownderville says. “That’s where the sizzle is in this town.” Smith grew up in Dallas. She credits Project Poëtica for helping bring “hero writers” like Tracy K. Smith and Jericho Brown to the Dallas reading public—and she sees the warm welcome visiting poets receive as a testament to the city’s homegrown literary energy. “As far as literature is concerned, Dallas has really felt like a city becoming,” her colleague Brownderville adds. Smith agrees: “It makes me feel proud to be from here.”
Evangeline Riddiford Graham is the senior editor of Public Seminar and host of the poetry podcast Multi-Verse.
