Over the last decade, many poets from North Carolina and beyond have participated in the West End Poetry Festival. Participants have included finalists for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Book Prize, the Oregon Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize; recipients of fellowships Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; and too many other accolades to easily list here.
Participants have also included poets at the beginning of their writing career with few, if any, publishing credits. The festival aims to be broadly representative of poets and poetry.
Some programs from the most recent festivals are available as PDFs:
2020 West End Poetry Festival (pdf unavailable)
2019 West End Poetry Festival (pdf unavailable)
2017 West End Poetry Festival (pdf unavailable)