Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Get your quick poetry fix! Mass Poetry presents the Traveling Poetry Emporium: poets Cassandra de Alba and Julia Story will offer poems-to-order on your subject, composed right before your eyes. Visitors to this booth can name any topic—large or small, real or imagined, object-specific or broadly thematic. One of the Emporium's poets will compose an original poem on your topic within five minutes, typed on a manual Hermes typewriter. The poet will read the poem aloud before handing you the only existing copy of the poem, which is yours to keep. Come with five minutes and leave with a one-of-a-kind made-to-order poem!

About LitCrawl
Lit Crawl features more than a dozen separate readings, performances, and interactive
games—all held outdoors in some of Cambridge’s hippest restaurant patios and performance
venues. This year’s event will have all of the quirky and unexpected fun that Lit Crawl attendees
have come to expect, but in order to manage capacities at our host venues, we need to institute
some new policies this year. These include requiring registration (free through Eventbrite for
events at Starlight Square, $15 for events at restaurants) for all events unless otherwise noted--
attendees must register separately for each session. The full schedule and registration link can be found here: https://bostonbookfest.org/year-round-events/lit-crawl-boston/

The Traveling Poetry Emporium Poets
Cassandra de Alba is a poet living in Massachusetts. Her chapbooks are habitats (Horse Less Press, 2016), Ugly/Sad (Glass Poetry Press, 2020) and Cryptids (Ginger Bug Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks, and Wax Nine, among other publications. She is a poetry reader for Underblong and an instructor at the Redbud Writing Project.

Julia Story is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande Books) and the chapbooks The Trapdoor (dancing girl press) and Julie the Astonishing (Sixth Finch Books). She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her recent work can be read in Sixth Finch, Tinderbox, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is a Midwesterner who now lives in Massachusetts.