Events and Activities
The biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival extends over four days of readings, discussions, and conversations with dozens of internationally and nationally renowned poets. The Festival will open on Thursday evening, October 7, with a Poetry Sampler reading by 24 Festival Poets in NJPAC's Prudential Hall.
Throughout each subsequent 
day of the Festival, simultaneous events will take place in intimate performance spaces seating 50 to 100, larger spaces seating 200, 400, or 600, and on the Main Stage of NJPAC’s Prudential Hall, which seats 2,700.
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is neither an academic symposium nor a writing conference. Through a wide range of poetry readings, storytelling sessions, and musical performances, participants are invited to spend four days immersed in our most ancient arts.
The daytime schedule offers so many inviting options occurring simultaneously that even the most avid and dedicated Festival-goer can succeed in experiencing only a fraction of the total choices available. In this regard, the Dodge Poetry Festival is like the unending river which is poetry itself. Here is a sampling of what you will find:
Readings
At the heart of the Festival are the series of readings that remind us poetry is historically an oral/aural art. Principal among this series are the half-hour readings by Festival Poets, which occur on the Main Stage in Prudential Hall every evening and during weekend afternoons.
These featured readings, sometimes punctuated by live music, are complemented by a range of mid-day readings by Festival Poets at venues throughout the Festival site.
Discussions
The Festival provides almost infinite opportunities for conversation - with Festival Poets, teachers, students, friends, and other members of the poetry community who come to share the common ground they've found at the Festival.
More formally, the Festival offers Poets on Poetry sessions in which individual Festival Poets discuss their own relationship to poetry by presenting and discussing poems (by others and by themselves) which are important to them.
Conversations: On the Life of the Poet bring together two to four poets to talk with each other and the audience about their lives and their art.
Other Conversations with panels of Festival Poets have included such topics as "The Mysterious Life Within Translation," "Poetry and Jazz," "Poetry and the Dignity of the Ordinary," and "Going Public with Private Feelings," among many others.
The Festival offers the public the chance to talk with accomplished poets in Conversations on Craft, which include discussions of work patterns and work habits as well as specific matters of poetic craft.
Storytelling
Perhaps poetry's oldest relative, there will be Storytelling sessions at various venues throughout the Festival.
Music
From strolling musicians to special main-stage events, the Festival will once again include a variety of musical performances.
