The fifth biannual Sun and Moon Poetry Festival will take place in Yellow Springs — almost entirely in Glen Helen — Friday–Sunday, May 15–17. The festival will include workshops, readings, public performances and, most importantly for organizers, artistic communion. (Submitted photo)
Yellow Springs to host Sun and Moon Poetry Festival
- Published: April 23, 2026
Dusk in late spring: The last motes of pollen fall to the forest floor, looking for their pine-needle bed. On the Little Miami, waterbugs draw their final figure eights. Above, the fading light hesitates on the beak of a yellow-rumped warbler.
Such is the natural verse of Glen Helen, where the Ohio Poetry Association will hold its fifth biannual Sun and Moon Poetry Festival Friday–Sunday, May 15–17. Registration ends April 22.
The nature-centered poetry festival is a weekend-long slate of writing workshops, readings, nature walks and panel discussions. The Poetry Festival will take place almost entirely in the Glen — on its winding trails or in the stone stillness of the Vernet Ecological Center — and will feature instruction from and discussion with 10 professional poets from across the country.
Beyond simply prompting poets to put their pens to paper, Ohio Poetry Association President Holly Brians Ragusa said the greatest highlight of the Sun and Moon Poetry Festival is giving registrants the chance to be in close communion with others of the craft.
“That’s a key tenet of being a poet — finding your community, and that’s exactly what Yellow Springs offers,” Ragusa told the News earlier this week. “We are building and expanding community — introducing poets to poets, introducing poets to poems and honing our craft. It’s like a kind of professional development.”
Naturally, the festival’s itinerary is fanciful. Friday night includes stargazing to the sounds of a flute; Saturday is a 12-hour docket of haiku hikes, sound baths, workshops and more; the final day wraps up the festival with an open mic event, a “metafactory generative session,” a panel, “street poetry” staged throughout downtown Yellow Springs for public enjoyment and more.
Since first coming to the village ten years ago, the festival has found a natural home in Glen Helen, Ragusa said. The preserve abounds with poems waiting to be written.
“In Yellow Springs, there’s such a kinship with the natural beauty,” she said. “It’s imperative to take a moment to commune with nature. For a poet, we notice that tiny fly that’s floundering in a bird bath. We notice when the last petals are about to fall off a bloom. We can’t help it. We feel it deeply and must communicate it on the page.”
Having enjoyed the last Sun & Moon Poetry Festival so much, villager and poet Ed Davis said he plans to attend this year and looks forward to again “schmoozing and learning from” other poets — if anything just to stoke his passion for prose.
“As important as air and water to many people, poetry sometimes gets a bad rap due to much academic poetry these days being purposely obscure,” Davis wrote to the News. “But there’s still plenty of the other kind: earthy and concrete, deploying language fresh as a moss-covered log after April rain.”
The complete schedule for the Ohio Poetry Association’s Sun and Moon Poetry Festival can be read at http://www.ohiopoetryassn.org/sun-moon-festival — where participants can also register.
Pricing for the festival is $65 for Ohio Poetry Association members and $85 for nonmembers. An $15 box lunch from Current Cuisine for Saturday can be added.
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
No comments yet for this article.