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��ɫ��’s Wick Poetry Center marks its 40th anniversary this year with three days of poetry events and a gala planned for September to celebrate the program that has provided a platform for creative voices across the globe.

“Our 40th celebration will be a testament to the ongoing mission of the Wick Poetry Center to encourage new voices and to bring poetry to the most urgent and evolving needs of our communities through readings, workshops, panels, interactive exhibits and digital platforms,” said David Hassler, the Bob and Walt Wick Executive Director of the Wick Poetry Center. “It will also be a joyous homecoming for so many of our past Wick authors, scholarship winners, student interns, community members, and the Wick family.”  

The celebration, Sept. 19-21, will include panel discussions, workshops and readings, culminating in a gala dinner on Saturday, Sept. 21, he said.  

Elite Poets Featured

The event will focus on the themes of Poetry and Healing, Poetry and Science, Poetry and Peace and Poetry and Social Justice, and will feature a start-studded lineup of poets including:  

: Irish Poet and theologian, Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. He is the host of On Being’s “Poetry Unbound” and the author of “Poetry Unbound; 50 Poems to Open Your Life.” “Feed the Beast” is his most recent collection with “Kitchen Hymns,” a volume of original poems, and an essayed poetry anthology “Poetry Unbound; Poems on Being with Each Other” are expected to be released this year. From 2014-2019, Ó Tauma was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. 

Based in San Antonio, Texas, Nye is a poet and children’s author, and was the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate from 2019-2022. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Award-winning poet, essayist and translator, Hirshfield is the author of 10 collections of poetry, and two collections of essays, and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past. In 2017, with the March for Science in Washington, she founded Poets for Science, an interactive exhibit of science poems and writing invitation housed at the Wick Poetry Center, which has traveled to venues across the country. 

 Based in Chicago, Matejka is editor of Poetry magazine. A graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the Master of Fine Arts program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Matejka served as poet laureate of Indiana in 2018-19. He is the author of “The Devil’s Garden,” which won the New York / New England Award and “Mixology” a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, “The Big Smoke,” was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His most recent collection of poems, “Somebody Else Sold the World” was a finalist for the University of North Texas 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel “Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century” was published in February 2023.   

All four will give readings and host panel discussions, while Wick staff will guide attendees through writing workshops and immersive tours of interactive exhibits centered around the four themes.

Poet Maggie Anderson, founding director of the Wick center, also will be a featured guest