2026 Program
Welcome to the 2026 Nantucket Poetry Festival Program! Public readings, guided workshops, and feature events are all found here, running from the night of August 27th to the morning of August 31st.
Some events require registration. Please see below before adding events to your calendar.
Thursday, August 27th
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4:00pm - 6:00pm
7 Fair Street — Quaker Meeting House | NHA Research Library
Kick off the 2026 festival season with an open archive at the Nantucket Historical Association’s Research Library. Opening remarks at 4:00pm by festival founder Anna Popnikolova and NHA’s Education Manager Lucy McGowan. Read a curated selection of Historical Association’s Nantucket poetry archives, enjoy light refreshments in the garden, and meet this season’s visiting poets!
This event is open to the public. No registration is required.
Friday, August 28th
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11:00am - 12:00pm
22 Federal Street — Cafe 22, 3rd floor
Join Trace Fossils Review in a guided discussion about the world of poetry publishing. Talk about innovation, events, presses, parties, and everything in between. What’s new and exciting in poetry?
Complementary pastries and coffee by Cafe 22.
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2pm - 4pm
4 Mill Street — NHA 1800’s House
Join us at 1800 House to create your own poet’s notebook or chapbook. In this two-hour, hands-on workshop, participants will learn bookbinding techniques from the NHA’s Director of Heritage Craft, Mary Lacoursiere, and will walk away with an exquisite hand-bound book. You can choose to create a notebook for your musings or bring copies of your own printed poems to create a chapbook of your work. All materials, including handmade decorative papers, will be provided.
This event is ticketed with capped enrollment.
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5:00 - 6:00pm
41 Main Street — Lemon Press — 2nd floor
Join us for an evening of poetry with two of our 2026 visiting poets. Poets’ books available for purchase at the reading’s conclusion. Ask our poets for a signing!
Wyn Cooper has published six books of poetry, including, most recently, The Unraveling. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, as well as in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. His first novel, Way Out West, was published in 2022.
Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collections are Sugar and The Sorrow Apartments. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series and teaches at Boston University.
This event is free and open to the public. A cash bar and light bites will be included at the venue.
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9:00pm
Milk Street Ext. — Maria Mitchell Loines Observatory
Join a selection of this year's Nantucket Poetry Festival visiting poets for a short poetry reading under the stars.
This event is ticketed. Register here.
Melissa Cundieff is a poet and author of Darling Nova, winner of the 2017 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. She is a lecturer of creative writing at Harvard University.
Emily Sue Tomac lives in Dallas, TX with her husband and two dogs, Sargent Pepper and Major Tom. Her poems have been published in The Grinnell Review and in Four Tulips' Out At Sea anthology.
"Stars" by Robert Frost
How countlessly they congregate
O’er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When wintry winds do blow!—
As if with keenness for our fate,
Out faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invisible at dawn,—
And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.
Saturday, August 29th
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8:00am - 1:00pm
Cambridge Street — Farmers & Artisans’ Market
See us at the Sustainable Nantucket Farmer & Artisan’s Market! Pick up our poets’ books, pre-order the 2026 Nantucket Poetry Festival anthology, and shop our merchandise.
This event is open to the public. Bring your poetry wish list!
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12:00pm - 2:00pm
5 Wherowhero Lane — Our House
Join visiting poet John Bonanni for a poetry workshop! Bring your own poetry and recieve feedback in this college-style class.
A Best New Poets, Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee, John Bonanni is a Cape Cod based writer whose collection retrovirology won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry in 2025. John founded the Cape Cod Poetry Review in 2011, and his poems have appeared in Foglifter, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Florida Review, Cortland Review, Washington Square Review, Verse Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. He is the recipient of individual artist grants from the Mass Cultural Council, the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod and the NEA; scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and residencies from the John Hay Writing Studio and AS220 in Providence, RI. His book reviews have appeared in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Rain Taxi, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Kenyon Review.
This event is free with limited seats available. Please register here ahead of time to reserve your seat.
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3:00pm - 5:00pm
8 Howard Street — Greater Light
Join fellow poets to draft new work in a serene, historic Nantucket property! A generative workshop led by 2026 visiting poet Wyn Cooper. Hosted by the Nantucket Historical Association.
Wyn Cooper has published six books of poetry, including, most recently, The Unraveling. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, as well as in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. His first novel, Way Out West, was published in 2022. His book of poems, Postcards from the Interior, is a collection of poems all written from different locales. Previously, Cooper taught a course on place-based writing at Bennington College.
This event is ticketed with capped enrollment.
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6:30pm - 7:30pm
11 Orange Street — Unitarian Universalist Church
Join us in the beautiful main hall of the Unitarian Church for an early evening poetry reading. Celebrate with our biggest annual event: a collection of works by the local poets of Nantucket.
Sunday, August 30th
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1:00pm - 3:00pm
5 Wherowhero Lane — Our House
Join Harvard poetry professor Melissa Cundieff in this 2-hour poetry workshop in the beautiful backyard of Our House.
My memory can be so gibbous. -Mary Ruefle
The sun is hot, salt air stings, and the bright moon undoubtedly rises. In this workshop we’ll consider images that come most easily to us and defamiliarize how we construct them. Through associative leaps, the complicating of syntax, paradox making, decontextualization, routine breaking, and summoning randomness, we’ll aim to describe things as they’ve never been described. By doing so, our poems will counterbalance the plain with the strange, so come ready to subvert.
This event is free with limited seats available. Register here ahead of time to reserve your seat.
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6:00pm - 7:00pm
54 Main Street — Mitchell’s Book Corner — 2nd floor
Celebrate the release of two new poetry chapbooks from our visiting poets: John Bonanni’s retrovirology (Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry) and Mary Ellen Redmond’s I Have One Student. Bonanni and Redmond will read from their collections with a book signing following. Come support your coastal poets, and hear work from the best of the contemporary Cape Cod poetry scene.
John Bonanni’sretrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry Kramer and Gaëton Dugas, others operate as ekphrasis against the creative artwork of ACT UP’s direct actions. Combining reinterpretations of formal elements such as the concrete poem, the abecedarian, and the villanelle, post-confessional poems converse with a docupoetic history through an arc that examines what it meant to grow up Queer as a child in rural Pennsylvania in the late ’80s and early ’90s, surrounded by messages of gay disease and the violence of its silences. retrovirology, then, resurrects Queer elders to allow memory to “rise from its subjugated state” (Jung) and to carry with it, into our futures, all of its wisdom and fire.
Mary Ellen Redmond’sI Have One Student celebrates the classroom as a community of characters, each of them distinct, unique, many of them unforgettable. As a teacher, Mary Ellen Redmond never stops thinking about those students when she leaves work. They ride with her on her way home, sometimes appear in her dreams, are almost always waiting in the morning when she wakes up. As a poet, she notices the things—big and small—that reveal the troubles and traumas of their lives. And she captures their stories in ways that will resonate not just with other educators but with anyone paying attention to the young lives unfolding around them. In her poems, you will meet Claudio from Haiti; Natalie, a sixth grader who reads Homer; David, who desperately needs a heart transplant; Sacul Rellek, who writes his name backwards; Deja, who silences the class by sharing something very personal; and many other ordinary, extraordinary students. And you won’t forget them, either. Nor will you want to.
This event is open to the public. Registration not required.
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7:30pm Reading | 8:30pm Open Mic
1 India Street — Nantucket Atheneum — Great Hall, 2nd floor
Join us for the concluding segment of Nantucket Poetry Festival. As Mary Oliver once wrote: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles in the desert repenting. You only have to... come to Nantucket Poetry Festival's open mic on August 30th, upstairs in the Atheneum.
Bring a poem from your collection, your notebook, your notes app. Read out your texts, your grocery store receipt, your resignation letter. Tell us your horoscope for the week. Recite something you know by heart. Make something up on the spot. Sign-ups first come, first serve.
This event is open to the public. Registration not required.