This year’s festival theme is "Language as Liberation," named for the newly published book of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's academic lectures and honoring the Ohio native's venerable legacy in American literature and culture.

Throughout the festival, we will explore the liberatory potentialities in writing new and different forms of poetry, building literary community, sharing creative work across social and cultural lines, and incorporating the themes and ethics of Toni Morrison's biography and art into our own.

This festival is sponsored by Mac's Backs Books. along with annual support from The Cleveland Foundation, Ohio Arts Council, The George Gund Foundation, and the people of Cuyahoga County through a pulic grant by Cuyahoga Aats and Culture. Partners include Loganberry Books, Hexagon Books, ThirdSpace Reading Room, Clevo Books, The Wandering Lantern, Reading Room CLE, and Visible Voice Books as well as Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Cleveland Arts Prize, CSU Poetry Center, One Mic Open, Poetry Unplugged, and Con Tú.