Please join us for the most exciting Community Outreach event this Autumn–the largest poetry reading in history! The Palm Beach Poetry Festival will be hosting an open mic in partnership with 100 Thousand Poets For Change, a global event. Poets will read and perform work to promote social/environmental sustainability/political change simultaneously across the planet. This event will be completely inclusive, and decentralized.

You are welcome to read your own work, or your favorite poems by other poets. Please limit your poem to one page, bring up to three poems, we will alternate readers as time allows.

After poets read, we will have special guest acoustic musicians playing songs for peace. If you’d like to bring your instrument and play along or sing, you are welcome. There will be a sign up sheet when you arrive.

During this event, we are hosting an important book drive. A long time attendee, (and one time intern) of the Festival Lorraine Stanchich, has started a Women’s Prison Poetry Project in Pembrook Pines, FL. She has a full class of 40 women and a waiting list of 50, they do not have any books! She would like to start a library for these women. Please bring your new, or gently used books and magazines to help her fill a few shelves. Lorraine will be joining us and will read some of the women’s poems. If you can’t make the event and have books to donate. Please contact me and we will arrange to pick them up from you.

We will be webcasting this event live. This event will also be videoed (if you can volunteer to do this please contact me) which will be permanently electronically archived at the University of CA, Stanford. I will be photographing artists as they take to the mic.

Erin, the Manager of the Bottega has graciously arranged to open two hours early for us and has special prices for wine by the glass or bottle. He is also offering a cheese platter special for $5.00. They have a small stage in the back of the venue where we will meet up.