The Free Verse Festival is the City of Charleston, SC’s first poetry festival. Our mission is to uplift the community by providing eclectic poetry events and workshops at multiple venues in Downtown and West Ashley. We’ll collaborate with the Charleston County School District to put poets in schools and promote the power of the written word. We’ll also treat poetry as public art, putting poems on sidewalks, napkins, t-shirts, billboards, buses and more.

The festival

The Free Verse Festival consists of three parts.

Part I. Poetry as public art.

Part 2. Workshops and events for students.

Part 3. Poetry at night.

The origin

The Free Verse Festival is the brainchild of Marcus Amaker, Charleston’s first poet laureate.

The hashtags

#freeversefestival
#freeversefest