Partnering with the Sacramento Poetry Center, Spoken Word Federation and more pillars in the creative community, Andru Defeye, Sacramento Poet Laureate Emeritus and founder, is hosting the second annual Sac Poetry Week from Oct. 20 until Oct. 26.
The week-long celebration will offer seven days of unique events across Sacramento to uplift and educate the city’s evolving poetry community.
In 2022, Defeye collaborated with Allison Joe, the deputy secretary for equity and work at the California State Transportation Agency, to expand the work he began with Sac Poetry Day. In 2024, the first annual Sac Poetry Week offered a new way to highlight the power of Sacramento prose.
“There absolutely was a need for the poetry community to be recognized,” Defeye said. “I’ve been around the country doing poetry, and our city has one of the strongest poetry communities that I’ve ever been in, from the elders to the youth.”
The week will begin with a “Kickoff Open Mic” hosted by the Sacramento Poetry Center, a creative and literary space for both veteran and emerging poets.
Patrick Grizzell, founding member and president of Sacramento Poetry Center, said that the center works to maintain an environment where poets of all backgrounds can connect through their work.
“Here [at the Sacramento Poetry Center] or any poetry room in Sacramento, we really want that space to be sacred in a way,” Grizzell said. “It’s there for one purpose, and that purpose is uniting people through their work as poets. And anything that really interferes with that really shouldn’t be there.”
Towards the end of the week on Friday, Oct. 24, the Spoken Word Federation will be hosting a one-on-one poetry slam. According to SWF founder and President David Loret de Mola, the slam will subvert the traditional practices of spoken word — as it will be performed in a taekwondo ring in the Toro Z Muay Thai gym.
“What we really focus on with the performers is making sure that everybody knows that we’re not competing head to head for who’s the best poet,” Loret de Mola said. “We’re competing for the love of the audience and everybody gets to shine. It’s all about making sure that people after the show had a damn good time.”
Each event is open to all poets, with plenty of room for those in the beginning stages of poetic expression. By the end of the week-long celebration, Sac Poetry Week said poets will have experienced the vastness of what’s considered the “poetry capital of California”, as declared by Sacramento City Council in 2022.
Grizzell said that Sac Poetry Week has presented an opportunity to reach poets in the Sacramento community that might face barriers when entering the art form.
“The thing that breaks down those barriers is just engaging with different poets, recognizing that all of us are doing the same thing in different ways,” Grizzell said.
Focused on accessibility, Defeye shared that he is working to expand the languages offered during the week-long event to accompany the recent addition of Spanish.
“I’m working to find a Filipino poet. I’m looking for a Hmong poet,” Defeye said. “Eventually, I would love to have every language that is spoken in Sacramento in [our] curriculum.”
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Mack Wilson, poet, political activist and SWF commissioner, said art saved their life and poetry helped inspire them by showing them how powerful the spoken word can be.
“The thing that I celebrate the most about poetry is that it reverberates,” Wilson said. “You speak those words into law and into existence, and you can just see the ripple effects that it has.”
The free-of-cost poetry curriculum within Sac Poetry Week offers an accessible space for Sacramento poets to connect and learn through “the transformative power of poetry,” featuring established poetry communities such as Mahogany Urban Poetry.
“I think Poetry Week is an entry point for everybody into poetry and into writing and all of the healing and community that come with poetry,” Defeye said.
