NEWBURYPORT — The third annual Newburyport Literary Festival next month will feature a visit by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, nationally known poet and essayist Dana Gioia.
The theme of the April 25 to 27 festival is Mundo y Palabra — Spanish for the World and the Word — and it will honor Newburyport's own nationally known poet, Rhina Espaillat, a longtime city resident who was born in the Dominican Republic.
A founding member of the Powow River Poets, Espaillat has published 10 collections of her work, including "Playing at Stillness," a bilingual collection of poems and essays called "Agua de Dos rios" ("Water of Two Rivers"), and a bilingual collection of her short stories, "El Olor de la Memoria/The Scent of Memory."
She has won numerous awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Nemerov Prize, three yearly prizes from the Poetry Society of America, the Barbara Bradley Award and the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club.
The Newburyport Literary Festival, which debuted in 2006, is sponsored by the Newburyport Literary Association, in collaboration with Newburyport Adult & Community Education, the Newburyport Public Library, and the Greater Newburyport Chamber of Commerce.
Founding sponsors are the Institution for Savings and the Newburyport Five Cents Savings Bank. Additional funding is provided by the Amesbury, Newbury, Newburyport and West Newbury cultural councils and The Provident Bank.
Espaillat and Gioia will be joined by 20 other poets at the three-day festival, and more than 50 authors are expected to participate.
Local writers scheduled to appear include Keith Ablow, Elisabeth Brink, Michael Cantor, Andre Dubus III, Ed Emberly, Erica Funkhouser, Aine Greaney, Dyke Hendrickson, Cheryl Richardson, William Sargent, Frank Schaeffer and Anne Easter Smith.
There will be a wide range of programs during the three-day festival.
It will all start on Friday evening, April 25, with "A Conversation About Poetry," moderated by Gioia and featuring Epaillat, X.J. Kennedy and Lewis Turco.
Emberly will be among the authors conducting a program for writers of children's and young adult books, along with Stephanie Greene, Anna Alter, Matt Tavares, Natasha Friend, Terry Farish, Lauren Weinstein and Mirta Ojito.
The young people's programs are scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, April 26, and will be held at two venues, the Montessori School on Pleasant Street and the City Council chamber at City Hall.
In conjunction with the festival, award-winning children's book author Yoko Kawashima Watkins will spend the mornings of April 17 and 18 at the Rupert A. Nock Middle School, working with students from Newburyport, Triton and Amesbury. Students will receive copies of Watkins' book, "So Far from the Bamboo Grove."
Gloucester novelist and short story writer JoeAnn Hart and Cambridge author Mameve Medwed will talk about "Laughing Out Loud — Authors Who Crack Us Up."
Ojito, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus," will also host and moderate a panel discussion on the dynamics of Latino literature. She will be joined by poet and editor Jose B. Gonzalez and Fulbright Scholar and novelist Sergio Troncoso.
A panel composed of historian Martha Hodes and novelists Julia Older, Patricia O'Brien and Smith will discuss "Her story: Women Writing About Women."
Poets Pat Callan, Don Kimball and Johnny Longfellow have a date with "The Shameless Muse," to celebrate the source of inspiration.
There will also be panel with titles such as "Investigating Crimes of the Century," "Our Fragile World" and "Memoir: Fatherhood — From Family to Faith to Fly Fishing."
Many of the authors will read from their works, including Dubus, Robert Finch, O'Brien, Laura Weinstein, Hart, Medwed, Troncoso, David Maine, Annecy Baez, Turco, Alan Weisman, Ann Hood, Joseph Hurka and William Sargent.
