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Look Back on 2023's La Guagua Festival!


In it's fourth year, La Guagua Poetry Festival featured 25 poets, translators, publishers, and editors from around the world on Friday, May 5 and Saturday May 6, 2023.

Open to the entire community and held in MCC's premier performance space, the Richard and Nancy Donahue Family Academic Arts Center, the festival focused on translation with an emphasis on immigration and social justice.

The festival included keynote presentations by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri and award-winning poet and translator Vanita Ruth, a live singing performance, multilingual reading panels, conversations about literary translation, and an interactive lunch  with featured poets.

Attendees received a hard copy of "La Guagua Poetry Anthology: The Path Belongs to Us." This anthology showcases the works presented at the festival by visiting poets and includes poems in Arabic, English, Filipino, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Urdu.

The festival was held from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Friday, May 5 and 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 6 at the Richard and Nancy Donahue and Family Academic Arts Center, located at 240 Central St. in Lowell.

Thanks for joining us in 2023! Check back here for La Guagua 2025 details.