*This post is part of Free for All’s “Making Magic” series, which will focus on Kelley’s exploration of the opportunities in the library’s Creativity Lab as well as musings about art, creativity and imagination.

Spring is here, and with it comes festivals! If you’re familiar with annual North Shore happenings, you know that warm weather means music festivals, art fairs, farmers’ markets and more. For today, I’d like to focus on one very special event in particular and that is the Mass Poetry Festival. Every May, the Mass Poetry Festival comes to Salem and brings three days of poetry readings, workshops, lectures and performances. Venues for the event are all in downtown Salem and include spaces as varied as Old Town Hall and Howling Wolf Taqueria.

Each year, in preparation for the event, the library offers a series called Get to Know the Festival Poets, which gives people a chance to learn about the event’s headlining poets with the guidance of local poet and professor Jennifer Jean. This year’s series just wrapped up, but you still have time to get a ticket to the Festival, so that you can see live readings with some of the poets we discussed. This year’s headliners include Louise Gluck, Eileen Myles, Ross Gay, and Cornelius Eady. If seeing some award winning poets read their work isn’t enough for you, the Festival also offers a small press fair, panel talks, open air performances, and poetry slams.

So mark your calendar for May 5th – May 7th! And in the meantime, why not read some of these great books written by participating Festival poets?

Poems, 1962-2012 by Louise Gluck
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poet, Louise Gluck will speak at the Festival as part of the Poetry Society of America’s current national series, Poetry and the Natural World.

The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This collection includes poems written by Cornelius Eady, a Festival headliner who will read on Saturday, May 6th. Eady is the author of Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.

I Must be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems by Eileen Myles
Described by Publishers’ Weekly as “ both an underground star and a major force in contemporary poetry,” Eileen Myles is the recipient of four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Creative Capital’s Literature Award as well as their Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Myles will read at the Festival on Saturday May 6th.

The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is the winner of  the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to writing award winning verse, Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.