First Ever Nantucket Poetry Festival Begins On Friday

The first ever Nantucket poetry festival kicks off August 9th, featuring award-winning poet Gregory Orr.

The festival begins with a reception at 56 Centre Street on Friday, followed by Orr’s reading on Saturday with a question-and-answer session facilitated by best-selling author and Nantucket High School graduate Gabriella Burnham. Burnham will read some of her own poetry as part of the second reading, which will also feature readings by a number of local poets. All events are free and open to the public.

Named the Farewell Poetry Festival, the event is the creation of 16-year-old Anna Popnikolova, who has grown used to doing things people her age aren’t supposed to do. The recent Nantucket High School graduate has already placed third at the state level in the annual Poetry Out Loud poetry reading competition and has been accepted to Harvard, where she will be attending college in the fall.

“I don't think of myself as a 16-year-old doing it. I think of myself as me doing it,” she said.

Popnikolova has always enjoyed reading and writing poetry and wanted to share her interests with the community.

“I wanted to start something that would be fun and that would carry on my interests and be something I felt like we didn't have enough of,” she said. “I hope to make it an annual thing because I think that there is a need for me, and for some people who are kind of like me, for this kind of thing.”

Popnikolova has shouldered the brunt of the organizing work herself, gaining support from the Nantucket Book Festival and Nantucket Book Foundation and securing most of the poets who will be presenting. Orr, the festival headliner and a seasonal visitor, was a particularly notable get. When Popnikolova first emailed him, she was doubtful he’d respond.

“I didn't think he was going to respond but he responded the next day and he was like yeah I'll do it. So that was awesome,” Popnikolova said. “He's coming down and he's going to be at all of our events. Including Sunday, he's going to be doing small group talks.”

But the local poets are just as important to Popnikolova as the headliner. While she isn’t opposed to Farewell Fest eventually becoming something like the Nantucket Book Festival, featuring a star-studded slate of internationally acclaimed poets, she wouldn’t want that to come at the expense of the festival’s local flair.

“What I want is to literally just be able to have kids from the high school that I know reading their poetry in front of a big crowd,” she said.