2025 Festival – Kalamazoo Poetry Festival invites poets Denise Miller, and Aaaron Coleman to read their work in downtown Kalamazoo. The Celebration of Community Poets and Open Mic celebrate their 12th year!

2024 Festival – Kalamazoo Poetry Festival explored the theme of Magic, with an open mic hosted by Fire, and the Celebration of Community Poets hosted by the Kalamazoo Northside Association for Community Development.

2023 Festival – Kalamazoo Poetry Festival celebrates 10 years with local poets and guest poets Hala Alyan, Kaveh Akbar, and Traci Brimhall.

2022 Festival – Poets explored the them of Home in our Celebration of Community Poets and workshops.

2021 Festival – Poets Danez Smith and Patricia Smith joined us for an amazing craft talk and performance.

2020 Festival – For our 2020 festival, we went digital! We asked poets to read their poems on video and submit them to the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival. A big thanks to our Emcees, Ed Genesis and Great Dane!

Air Poetry – The Kalamazoo Poetry Festival presents Air Poetry, a late summer poetry reading co-sponsored by Kazoo Books.

2019 Festival – Poets Sally Wen Mao and Sierra Freeman showed us how human and hilarious poetry could be. And we had a three day festival with the most workshop offerings to date.

2018 Festival – The musical ensemble Last Gasp, which often uses poetry in its performances, lit up the Celebration of Community Poets and our reading featuring our first ensemble community poem.

2017 Festival – The Kalamazoo Poetry Festival is excited to feature Kalamazoo’s own Diane Seuss.

2016 Festival – The Kalamazoo Poetry Festival invites Natalie Diaz and Jamal May to the festival stage.

2015 Festival– The Celebration of Community Poets takes center stage in the second annual Kalamazoo Poetry Festival

2014 Festival – The first Kalamazoo Poetry Festival featuring Arecelis Girmay and Ilya Kaminsky