Columbia, SC will be a poetry vortex this week!
Join me for the Soda City Poetry Festival and poeTRYhealing with The Loft Literary Center
I am so excited about all the poetry events coming up this week!
For the second year in a row, the Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia, Jennifer Bartell Boykin, is bringing together an amazing celebration of poetry in the city with the Soda City Poetry Festival, which was recently featured in The Free Times.
The theme of the 2025 festival is One River, One Boat: Celebrating South Carolina's Poets. This title gets its inspiration from Marjory Wentworth's poem "One River, One Boat." Wentworth is the most recent poet laureate of South Carolina; she resigned in 2020, and the governor of our state has yet to appoint a new laureate although he was given a list of qualified finalists.
This year's festival not only brings attention to the empty state poet laureate position, it also celebrates the rich heritage, vibrant present, and illustrious future of SC's poets. For the 2025 Festival, we will feature poets from across the state to include the four major regions of the state: the Pee Dee, The Midlands, the Lowcountry and the Upstate. The festival will include poetry writing workshops, readings, and poetic conversations. Programming will be available for all ages including children and teenagers.
The second annual Soda City Poetry Festival will be June 27th and June 28th, 2025 in Columbia, South Carolina. Most events will happen at Richland Library Main, where all workshops, readings and poetic conversations will happen. A poetry kickback session and an SC Poets Laureate Reading & Dinner will happen offsite. All events at the library are free, but the Laureate dinner will be a ticketed event.
Come see me!
I am honored to have been chosen as one of three poets to represent the Midlands region of the state at the festival along with the fabulous poets Naya Lanai and Evelyn Berry. We will be reading on Saturday, June 28 from 1:45-2:45.
Evelyn and Naya will also be leading a workshop, “Writing Against Silence,” on Friday from 10:30-11:45 AM. There are so many great workshops that day, and you can see the full line-up of free workshops here.
Also on Saturday evening is A Reading & Dinner with the South Carolina Poets Laureate, including the former State Poet Laureate, Marjory Wentworth, from whose leadership and groundbreaking poem, “One River, One Boat,” the festival gets its inspiration.
For the full schedule of workshops, readings, and poetic conversations, and to register for the Poet Laureate Dinner, visit the Soda City Poetry Festival website.
For those of you who live too far away to attend the festival, I invite you to join me for a live, online class hosted by The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Saturday, June 28 from 9-12 Central Time.
poeTRYhealing:
healing from individual and collective trauma
poeTRYhealing is a three-hour class led by Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., an award-winning poet and scholar of trauma that will introduce participants to a diverse group of poets who use poetry as a way to heal from individual and collective trauma.
During the class, we will read selections from Gloria Anzaldúa, Ellen Bass, Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde, Anne Sexton, and Ocean Vuong.
Each poem will be read for the emotional healing power it presents, and specific elements of what makes a poem effective as a form of witness and recovery will be explored. An essential part of our gathering will be to give ample time during the class for students to respond to the poetry by writing journal entries or poems of their own based on carefully crafted writing prompts.
All writing will be kept private to ensure a safe and nurturing environment for all. Everyone is welcome, and this will be a supportive, caring, and non-competitive experience where students—from those just beginning their writing journeys to those with expertise in writing, teaching, publishing, or the mental health professions-- can explore the healing power of poetry.
I’m really proud to live in a place that has a deep commitment to poetry and diversity, and I’m honored to have the opportunity to reach wider audiences by teaching for The Loft Literary Center.
We are living in hard times, people.
But as we all know, Audre Lorde taught us that “poetry is not a luxury.”
Poetry is food. Medicine. Bread. Water. Life.
Times like these are what poetry was made for. I am so grateful to be living at this time, right now, with you. Because together is the only way out and through.
And to thank you for the gift of your attention, for having read this far, and for all the love and support you give me, I’m sharing a photo from last weekend when my wife and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary by holding a vow renewal ceremony under the mother-daughter tulip poplar trees in our back yard.
Below is the song we chose as the theme for the ceremony, and I share it with you now in the hopes that you, too, will know the healing power of poetry and song and love and deep faith in what really makes life great.
With love,
Cassie
Awesome!! See you there! 😊