There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Mourn, Heal, and Take to the Streets with Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Others

• 2021
• Poetry
• Race/Identity

The iconic Lawrence Ferlinghetti, revered poet and co-founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Books, famously claimed, “Printer’s ink is the greater explosive.” Ferlinghetti died at age 101 just a couple of months ago, but his spirit lives on in poets such as the literary revolutionaries featured in our Saturday night headliner event. The power of words to spark change and detonate oppression has never been more needed than it is today.

Pulitzer winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and literary critic and author John Freeman invited some of America’s most socially engaged and beloved writers to pen letters, essays, poems, lamentations, and exhortations in response to our tumultuous time in history. There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love is an “eloquent and urgent” (Kirkus) distillation of what we’re living through as a country, a transcription “from the inner chambers of the heart” (Literary Hub). The writers express grief, seek hope, and demand total transformation of society after this plague year when so many people literally have struggled to breathe, whether from a policeman’s knee on their neck or virus in their lungs, not to mention the truly “breathtaking” display of dysfunction in government. Smith envisions that the book may “serve a use for you like that of a road map for a nation that is no longer idling.”

Stepping off the table of contents and into our living rooms are Smith herself; criminal justice reform advocate, Obama appointee, and award-winning poet Reginald Dwayne Betts; and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Camille Dungy. Guiding the conversation is Ismail Muhummad, story editor for the New York Times Magazine and a member of the Festival’s program committee. Show up as an ally, a citizen, and a fellow survivor of an unprecedented and explosive year.