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Although the current recession is hammering all sectors of the literary economy, including publishers of books and magazines, booksellers, and service organizations—not to mention writers themselves—one of the community's smallest but most important components is proving particularly vulnerable.
Despite the cancellation of its 2010 poetry festival, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation recently launched a channel on YouTube featuring twenty-nine videos of poets reading at past festivals. The biennial event, which is held in Waterloo Village, New Jersey, has hosted blockbuster poets such as Billy Collins, Robert Hass, Maxine Kumin, and Paul Muldoon.
Earlier this month, Brian Turner, Buddy Wakefield, Ofelia Zepeda, and other poets gathered in the desert for the twenty-seventh annual Tucson Poetry Festival.
Boston-area poets and poetry fans came in from the cold last weekend to read, listen, and mingle at one of the city's best-known literary events: the Boston National Poetry Month Festival.
The township of Montclair, New Jersey, recently offered to host the financially beleagured Dodge Poetry Festival, a biennial event sponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation. The festival, which was founded in 1986 in Waterloo Village, New Jersey, and moved to Hillsborough, New Jersey, in 2003, was suspended earlier this year.
Margaret Atwood has cancelled her plans to attend the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature (EAIFL) in Dubai after learning that British author Geraldine Bedell was told by organizers that she could not be a part of the event because one of the characters in her forthcoming novel, The Gulf Between Us, is gay.
Isobel Abulhoul, director of the new Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature (EAIFL), recently informed British novelist Geraldine Bedell that she could not be a part of the event because one of the characters in her forthcoming novel is gay.
No two writers write alike, but when two hundred gather for an event—as they did at this year's Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, held at Christ Church College in Oxford from March 31 through April 6—some common themes tend to emerge.
Five years ago, as poets and readers attended the annual StAnza poetry festival, the war began in Iraq. This year's festival, held from March 12 to March 16, acknowledged that anniversary explicitly with its two themes, "Poetry & Conflict" and "Sea of Tongues."
