This UGA Poetry Festival event features readings, Q&A, and book-signing with celebrated poets Michael Collier, Vievee Francis, and Garrett Hongo. The festival takes place November 4-5 and is presented by The Georgia Review and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, in partnership with the department of English and the Creative Writing Program, as part of the university's 2025 Spotlight on the Arts. Books and other publications will be available for purchase at the event. The keynote event in the UGA Poetry Festival, featuring Edward Hirsch and Robin Coste Lewis, takes place at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, in the UGA Chapel. Both events are free and open to the public.

Michael Collier is the author of eight books of poems: The Clasp and Other Poems; The Folded Heart; The Neighbor; The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Dark Wild Realm, An Individual History, My Bishop and Other Poems, and The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems. He is also co-editor, with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, of A William Maxwell Portrait. His translation of Euripides’s Medea appeared in 2006 and a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back, in 2007. Collier has received Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences from 1994-2017 and Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, he is an emeritus professor of English.

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (2023); Forest Primeval (2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (2006). Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Born in West Texas and raised in Metropolitan Detroit, she received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a Kresge Fellowship. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.
Poet, memoirist, and audio writer Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai’i and grew up there and in Los Angeles. He earned his BA from Pomona College and his MFA from the University of California-Irvine, where he studied with the poets C.K. Williams, Howard Moss, and Charles Wright. His poetry collections are Yellow Light (1982), The River of Heaven (1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Coral Road (2011). In non-fiction, he has published The Mirror Diary (2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995), perhaps his best known work. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a frequent contributor of audio articles to Soundstage! Ultra and lives in Eugene, where he is Distinguished Professor at the University of Oregon.