O, MIAMI: 2.5 Million people, 2.5 Million poems

O, Miami launches on April 1 with the stated goal of touching each of Miami-Dade county’s 2.5 million residents with a poem during National Poetry Month. Performers during the month-long festival include Anne Carson, Denise Duhamel, James Franco, and poet laureate W. S. Merwin.
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Miami is a county-wide poetry festival inaugurating in April 2011. Produced by the University of Wynwood and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, O, Miami is a month-long series of events and projects with the simple goal of every person in Miami-Dade County finding a poem. Mixing traditional readings with innovative poetry-in-public-places projects, the festival will weave poetry into the fabric of the city’s existing infrastructure and cultural life. Events will be conducted in multiple languages, sometimes simultaneously, often in collaboration with other cultural organizations. O, Miami culminates in a four-day series of readings from April 27-30, 2011 at the Frank Gehry-designed New World Symphony Hall on Miami Beach.
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Miami’s events include: premier readings across geographical, cultural and linguistic divisions, poetic maps and tours of Miami-Dade County, the first-ever Miami Poet Census, poetry lesson plans and activities in schools, collaborations with local universities, museums, and galleries, poems on menus in restaurants, radio spots of poems in English, Spanish and Creole, poems displayed throughout the Miami-Dade Public Library System, as well as poems displayed in public places both expected and unexpected.
The University of Miami’s Richter Library will house a lasting record of O, Miami in their Special Collections Department at the completion of the festival. Omiami.org, designed by Whitney Biennial 2008 artist David Reinfurt, presents an active digital documentation of our events, activities, and projects.
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