Intercollegiate Poetry Showcase

Future In Verse: Spotlighting the Voices of Young Poets as Glimpses into the Future

Overview

Every year, Mass Poetry brings together professor-nominated undergraduate poets from over 15 colleges in the Greater Boston area. With a professor or faculty’s guidance in practicing and revising a poem, one young artist from each institution will perform an original set at our intercollegiate showcase. The event, taking place at the GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, will include a keynote address from local Boston poet, Diannely Antigua, about developing craft, navigating life as a working artist, and understanding the larger role and responsibilities of poets in illustrating our shared future. 

Mass Poetry will publish an accumulative anthology featuring pieces written by every student participant, which will be released at the post-show reception. The reception will be catered and include photo ops. This is a wonderful chance for college poets to build connections with peers, learn more about the post-grad artist life, gain performance experience, and have an original work published! We look forward to coming together with our university partners to celebrate, and we offer our thanks to Boston College, the former home of this program.

Join us April 11th to celebrate the voices of our future! 

ABOUT OUR KEYNOTE: DIANNELY ANTIGUA

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project. 

PARTICIPATING COLLEGES: 

BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC · BOSTON COLLEGE · BOSTON CONSERVATORY · BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY · BUNKER HILL COMMUNITY COLLEGE · EMERSON COLLEGE · LESLEY UNIVERSITY · MASSART · NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY · REGIS COLLEGE · SALEM STATE · SUFFOLK · TUFTS · UMASS BOSTON · UMASS LOWELL · AND MORE…

Are you an undergraduate poet who doesn’t see your college listed? Contact programassistant@masspoetry.org to see if a spot is still available. 

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED:

• Event Support
• Videography 
• Fill out our Volunteer Interest Form HERE.

STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES ABOUT OUR LINE UP!