This years Poetry Downtown Festival will be held in Boston on September 27, New York and Philadelphia on September 28 and Baltimore on September 29.
Official Reading
Each city will feature up to 13 poets, who will each have approximately 9 minutes and 15 seconds to share their work. Assuming all 13 poets (=120 minutes / 13 poets) attend! If you’d like to participate in the official reading, you’ll need to be a selected poet. To be considered, please submit your poem inspired by “The Raven” by September 1st. Our jury will announce the top 52 poets of 2024 on September 5th.
Open Mic
As we’ve observed from previous editions, poets generally prefer not to travel far for a brief reading, so we often see a strong turnout from local poets. This is why we always offer an open mic after the official readings by the poets featured in our anthology. We’re unsure how many selected poets will attend at each reading. However, if, for example, 8 selected poets will read and 3 open mic poets wish to read, we’ll allocate approximately 13 minutes for each of the selected poets (104 minutes total) and 5 minutes for each open mic poet (15 minutes total).
Important: If more than 10 selected poets attend, there will be no open mic session!
