Nantucket Poetry Festival: 2026 Poets
John Bonanni
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 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.
Related Events: 2026 Program
Find John Bonanni at the events listed below. View the full 2026 itinerary here.
Opening Night: Poetry from the Archives | Thursday, August 27th | Quaker Meeting House, 4 - 6 pm
Publishers Roundtable with Trace Fossils Review | Friday, August 28th | Cafe 22, 3rd floor, 11 am - noon
Poetry Market! at the Nantucket Farmers & Artisans Market | Saturday, August 29th | Cambridge St. — Farmers & Artisans Market, 9 am - 1 pm
Visiting Poet Reading: Mary Ellen Redmond and John Bonanni | Sunday, August 30th
Books Featured at the Festival
retrovirology
University of Pittsburg Press, 2026
Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
“Committed to ‘remember what everyone wants to forget,’ retrovirology is stirring, persuasive proof that courage and outrage have mattered, and still can. The subjects here: intimacy and revolution, history and our rights, and equally, the slow burn of queer joy, the unstoppable fire of queer visibility. John Bonanni makes from that fire an essential music.”
— Carl Phillips, author of Scattered Snows, to the North