A literary destination: Magic City Poetry Festival highlights ‘amazing’ Birmingham writing community

EDITOR'S NOTE: Just before our press time, Iron City Ink learned that the entire schedule for the Magic City Poetry Festival has been postponed due to concerns about the COVID19 pandemic. For the complete statement from MCPF organizers, go to magiccitypoetryfestival.org. Despite the postponement, we offer the following story as a way to at least draw some positive attention to a vibrant Birmingham literary community. And we look forward to attending the festival later in 2020.

April is National Poetry Month, a tradition begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets.

Billed as the largest literary celebration in the world, National Poetry Month is a time to recognize poetry’s important place in our culture.

Poetry lovers in the Magic City won’t be left out.

The annual Magic City Poetry Festival (MCPF) is back in Birmingham for the third year April 3-30 to showcase local and national poets.

The MCPF is co-sponsored by PEN America, the famed literary organization that fights for free speech.

“We have so much art and history and vibrant culture here in Birmingham, and it only makes sense that we celebrate National Poetry Month in a big way,” MCPF Founding Director Ashley M. Jones told Iron City Ink.

The festival will take place in 15 venues with about 30 featured readers, as well as numerous open-mic performers, Jones said.

In addition to helping local readers and writers take part in National Poetry Month, the MCPF is a way to celebrate a vibrant and perhaps underappreciated literary scene in Birmingham.

Since it began in 2018, the event has helped boost the careers of local poets and writers.

It’s another chance for poets to raise their voices about social and cultural issues.

Festival organizers also seek to have the event “remain rooted in the community,” Jones said.

A few years ago, Jones had a dream of beginning a festival like this in the Magic City.

The dream came to fruition beginning in about 2017, when Birmingham writer and festival co-organizer Alina Stefanescu was contacted by Kyle Dacuyan, former PEN America outreach coordinator, who was searching out possible activities here.

“We began our partnership via creating the Magic City Poetry Festival,” Jones said.

In October 2019, Birmingham became the location of one of six new chapters of PEN America, with Jones and Stefanescu serving as co-organizers.

The fact that the city now has a PEN America chapter is another sign of the literary ferment and activity in the city.

The MCPF is also “a part of this art and culture Renaissance we’re experiencing in Birmingham right now,” Jones said.

“We’re a literary destination, and I think the festival is helping to make that point very clear,” she said.

“Birmingham’s writing community is a hidden gem” and it “deserves more attention,” said Tina Mozelle Braziel, a local poet won the coveted Philip Levine Prize for Poetry in 2017 for her book “Known by Salt,” is the director of the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at UAB and served as the MCPF Eco-Poet for 2019.

One goal of the event is to draw attention to the many fine writers in the city and state. “Birmingham and Alabama writers are some of the very best in the nation and world,” Jones said.

To name just a few, Jones has published two poetry collections and won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2019 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.

Stefanescu, originally from Romania, won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize, and her Brighthorse Prize-winning debut fiction collection was published in 2018.

Kwoya Fagin Maples, who will perform during the MCPF, is the author of “Mend,” a powerful book of poems about enslaved women in Alabama undergoing gynecological procedures. The book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.

Laura Secord, the MCPF director of community engagement, has been a spoken word artist and event producer for over 20 years and co-founded the Sister City Spoken Word Collective in Birmingham.

The literary scene in Birmingham “needs that attention precisely because there are so many talented and hopeful writers here,” Stefanescu said. “The challenge isn’t so much in getting attention for local writers but in sharing that attention and distributing it in an equitable manner.”

But the MCPF “works hard to center voices from the margins,” she said.

Organizers are also bringing in some famed writers from outside Birmingham.

Those visiting writers include DaMaris Hill, author of the acclaimed book “A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing,” and Camille T. Dungy, a poet whose essay collection “Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Brooklyn-based Mira Jacob is the author of the graphic memoir “Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations,” which was praised by such outlets as The New York Times, Time and Esquire.

The MCPF is a powerful networking and career opportunity for writers, participants said.

The events have “connected writers to a broad and large audience in Birmingham,” Braziel said. “Many MCPF events have been standing room only, which attests to Birmingham’s appetite for inclusive, community-based poetry programs.”

The MCPF “has given me an opportunity to see an array of artists and others interested in poetry,” said Birmingham poet and storyteller Salaam Green, who will appear at the festival on April 11. “The wonderful people I encounter within the city and beyond never disappoint.”

And it is not just the careers of writers that benefit from this increased awareness.

“The Birmingham writing community deserves so much more attention locally because of the history stored in the streets and in the bones of this city’s citizens,” said Brian “The Voice” Porter, a poet, performer and event producer who co-founded the popular Bards and Brews open mic and poetry slam series.

“The stories that have not yet been told of life here in the Magic City are made of the kind of power that can fill places in the heart and heal the soul,” Porter said.

The literary community in Birmingham is “amazing,” and not just because of the talent here, said Jones, who notes that the local scene also features a strong, supportive bond between writers.

“As a community, we focus on supporting and celebrating everyone instead of competing against each other,” said Tina Mozelle Braziel.

There is also a strong community focus in the MCPF, which stages events with local arts organizations, colleges and galleries.

The festival seeks “to identify, partner with, and include people who are already and have been working in poetry in Birmingham,” Jones said. “We want to support those groups and groups that are just being born.”

There is a long tradition of social engagement on the part of poets and other writers, and the MCPF continues that tradition.

For example, the MCPF has named Birmingham poet and storyteller Salaam Green as its Eco-Poet for 2020. Green will work with Birmingham eco-group GASP to combat environmental racism and talk about such issues as sustainability and climate change.

“I believe as writers we are tempted, pulled, and pushed into hard spaces and are given questions to answer,” Green said. “The poet’s pen is a place to reflect on those questions.”

One benefit of the MCPF is that attendees can enjoy poetry as performance, a different way to encounter the art.

“People should hear poets, especially spoken word poets, perform live to really hear the emotion and see the expressions and movements that belong to the works,” Porter said. “It’s like reading a play on the page and saying that’s a good story. But seeing that play performed by great actors makes the experience legendary.”