Dodge Poetry Festival Returns To Newark, Celebrating the City’s Growing Literary Legacy

The Dodge Poetry Festival, the nation’s largest poetry festival, returns to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark from Oct 15 to 17. The festival includes free poetry workshops, activities, and readings by poet laureates and Def Jam Poetry alumni.

The festival, funded by the Dodge Foundation, will feature over 100 poets from California to the Tri-State area, the Carolinas, and beyond. 

This year’s festival comes as Newark welcomes its first city poet laureate, Mia X. Dodge Poetry played an important role in selecting this coveted position.

“It’s significant in that Newark’s never had a poet laureate before and we’re finally getting to a place where we’re ready for it and we’ve been ready for it,” said Ysabel González, Director of the Dodge Poetry Festival, who noted that the 2026 festival received over 200 applicants for just 30 slots. 

“Our bread and butter is being able to place all of these rich, diverse, varied poets in conversation with each other whether they’re well established or just emerging,” she added.

The festival, which first began in 1986 in Waterloo, initially resembled an intimate writers’ retreat. Then, in 2010, the festival location was changed to Newark, a significant stride taken to make the festival more accessible to the general public.

“It made a lot of sense with the festival now in the 21st century,” said González. “People who wanted to use mass transit to get there now could. You want to bring that to a vibrant city and Newark is a city of poets, art, and culture.” 

Isabelle hopes the festival will be a display of the profound impact of poetry and how, as an art form, it’s able to transcend differences in age, race, background, gender, and orientation.

“When you have that, you’re going to have these amazing conversations with each other that one would never have,” she says. “We’ve had a lot of success in being able to gather and convene.”

The first day of the festival, Oct. 16, will be kicked off by the Academy of American Poets, who will be curating sessions with their chancellors such as The Art of Revision. There will also be a free open mic mixer hosted by Blue Culture, a Newark organization that contributes to the poetry community. 

The second day is Young Artist Day, drawing teachers and students from the Tri-State area. It will also feature the “punk poet laureate” Patti Smith—an acclaimed singer, songwriter, and poet is best known for her debut album, 1975’s Horses—at Prudential Hall at 8 p.m. for a night of music and stories. 

Other events include Family Fun Day hosted by HOT 97’S DJ Drewski, Praise and Reclamation at NJPAC’s Victorian Theatre—featuring percussionists alongside several poets including Meg Day, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Rickey Laurentiis, Rajiv Mohabir, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jose Olivarez, and Danez Smith—and the Future is Female a powerful performance rooted in female empowerment with Elizabeth Acevedo, Diamond Forde, Aja Monet, and Patricia Smith. 

Other participating poets include Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who has, in the past, only been able to appreciate the festival from afar. Hailing from the Bay Area, Joseph will be making his first in-person appearance at this year’s festival. For poets like him, being a part of the Dodge Poetry community, and the festival itself represents a sort of homecoming. 
“The poetry community  [and] the people that are a part of this festival are home to me,” said Joseph. “Platforms like the Dodge Poetry Festival and institutions like NJPAC are so important because there are ultimately a million points that need conduits to shine. Sometimes they’re musical or dance-based. For the Dodge Poetry Festival, they’re literary.”

Joseph was the former Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center, a position he took up in 2019, before he was fired by the current presidential administration, a move that he feels only happened because he was doing his job well.

“Whether that’s a threat to someone, you have to look at how hard the current administration has made the resourcing and platforming of arts education and humanities in our country,” he said. “Is it unheralded? Is it daunting? Is it unfortunate? Yes. Is it unexpected? Not really. I think being an excellent artist and leading an arts institution with an artist’s heart runs adrift and afoul of the institutional intentions of the current administration.” 

Much of Joseph’s interest in poetry revolves around family, where he finds himself increasingly curious about how families overcome oppression and the cultural emblems that emerge out of survival. 

“At its best, poetry offers a permission structure for us to feel,” he says. “It names these key moments that you don’t otherwise get an opportunity to name in everyday life. I think one of the broader questions we can ask ourselves as Americans is ‘what is the threat of art and why underresource it?’ I think for this festival, this is an opportunity to expand it rather than constrict it.” 

Festival passes for ticketed events can be found online at njpac.org/series/dodge-poetry-festival.