30 Poets in 30 Days

Welcome to Larksong's celebration of National Poetry Month - 30 Poets in 30 Days! This annual event brings together poets from all over the country with poets local to Nebraska. This year we asked Larksong members first to fill half the reading slots, and the other half we filled during a visit to the Associated Writing Program's Conference and Book Fair in Seattle. Most of those were new acquaintances and this event was their introduction to Larksong. The mix of new and familiar allowed us to reach in this one program one of the primary objectives of all the programs we offer: to bring new voices to Nebraska audiences and help send Nebraska voices out into the world. Nebraska has a rich and active literary life and this 30 Poets program is designed to celebrate it.

We recorded 30 poets for this event - 31 actually, there's a bonus double reading on April 6! We reached them via Zoom, visited them in their homes, found them at work, at the airport, and at the Associated Writing Program Conference in Seattle. The poems range from heartbreaking to laugh-out-loud funny, and like such emotions in life they are all mixed up in this list, so you never know what you'll find when you click on a link and start watching. Be ready for anything!

The link to each daily reading will become "live" at 3 am CST on the date they're listed. To watch, click on the 30 Poets 30 Day thumbnail image. The video will play in your browser. Once live the link will stay live so you can watch as many times as you like. You can also find them on YouTube on Larksong's channel under 30 Poets in 30 Days. There's even a playlist!

A big thank you to all the poets involved!

Enjoy!

April 25 - Yolanda Franklin

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Yolanda Franklin is a poet’s poet. You can't help but feel joy when you hear or read her poetry even when the poems are filled with vulnerablility and pain. As the poet Camille Dungy wrote “Yolanda J. Franklin writes poems marked by vitality and wonder, urgency and care.”

Yes, yes she does.

Yolanda J. Franklin is a contemporary African-American poet, author of Blood Vinyls (Anhinga Press 2018) which Roxane Gay calls ‘a must-must-must read.’ A four-time Fulbright Scholar Award Finalist, Franklin is also a Cave Canem, Callaloo, and VONA Fellow. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Frontier Magazine, Sugar House Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Langston Hughes Review. Her poetry also appears in the anthology It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop (Minor Arcana Press 2017).

She is a two-time recipient of the J.M. Shaw Academy of American Poets Award. Franklin is a proud third-generation Floridian.