James Wright Poetry Festival returns home to the Ohio Valley

The James Wright Poetry Festival is returning to its home in Martins Ferry, Ohio, birthplace of the prize-winning poet, on Saturday, April 29.

Started in 1981, a year after Wright’s death, the festival drew dozens of major poets and writers and hundreds of poetry lovers to the Ohio River town until state funding cuts shut the event down in 2008.

Pennsylvania-based poets David Swerdlow and Philip Terman, with help from David Newman of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, have brought the festival back to life with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

The daylong event at the Martins Ferry Public Library features the poet’s biographer, Jonathan Blunk, and poet David Baker, author of 13 poetry collections and longtime editor of The Kenyon Review. The festival opens at 8:30 a.m. Blunk’s lecture is at 11 a.m., and Baker reads his work at 4 p.m.

For the full schedule: https://www.ohiopoetryassn.org/james-wright-festival-2023.

Wright won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His collected works, “Above the River,” was published in 1992, drawing on his six books of poetry. His son Franz, who died in 2015, was also an award-winning poet.