Both the sun and the moon cooperated beautifully for Saturday’s Sun & Moon Poetry Festival, organized by Full/Crescent Press and co-sponsored by the Ohio Poetry Association.
The day was a huge success, organizers report. Poets and poetry lovers came all over Ohio, including Toledo, Dayton, Mansfield, and Cincinnati.
Events included an eco-poetry workshop sponsored by OPA and led by Susann Moeller, held in the Delaware County District Library on Winter St., a poetry nature hike and “haiku death match” at Stratford Ecological Center, and the fourth annual Poetry at Perkins Observatory benefit reading.
Highlights of the day included a surprise win for Delaware poet Susan Hendrickson in the haiku match. The match itself included competitors eight-grader Natalie Noble, daughter of Stratford apiarist Dave Noble, battling against her English teacher Mindy Hall.
A total of 20 performed at the festival, including Juan Armando Rojas Joo, associate professor of modern foreign languages at Ohio Wesleyan University, and Amit Majmudar, Ohio’s poet laureate and a brand-new resident of Delaware County.
The day’s events concluded with night-sky viewing on the lawn of Perkins Observatory, courtesy of volunteers from the Columbus Astronomical Society, where guests were able to view our moon, as well as Jupiter and two of its moons.
