Poetry Expo 26

We are delighted to announce the fourth edition of Poetry Expo 2026, curated and organised by Versopolis, the European platform for poetry. Building on the visionary success of the previous editions, the 2026 Expo returns with a sharpened urgency and an expanded global reach - calling upon poets, artists, collectives, and institutions to respond to the fractured, shifting conditions of the world we now inhabit.

 

In an era marked by disintegration - ecological collapse, war, displacement, censorship, disinformation, algorithmic fatigue - poetry persists. It speaks from the margins. It traces the silences. It imagines what comes next.

 

Poetry Expo 2026 invites creators from around the world to explore the poetic response to this moment. With the theme “Writing in the Wake of the World - New Verses for Torn Times,” this year’s edition focuses on how language survives disaster, how poetic form adapts to a collapsing real, and how the act of writing can become a gesture of repair, resistance, and radical imagination.

 

A fully digital, open, and globally accessible exhibition, Poetry Expo 2026 creates a space where diverse voices - individual and collective, analogue and digital, grounded and speculative - can resonate across borders. We welcome the unpolished, the experimental, the vulnerable, the fierce.

 

This year’s Expo will be structured around seven curated pavilions that reflect the complex realities we are called to write within and against. Participants are invited to submit work that aligns with one or more of the following themes:

 

What does it mean to write after? After war, after pandemic, after disaster, after extinction. This pavilion explores poetry as a medium of mourning, witnessing, and remembering — a living archive of what might otherwise be erased. From Gaza to Mariupol, from drought zones to diaspora, from personal grief to planetary mourning, these are verses that refuse to forget.

 

The Anthropocene has ruptured our myths of control. Poets are now listening to the more-than-human world: forests, species, weather, bacteria, oceans. This pavilion invites poetic work that de-centres the human and foregrounds new kinships, eco-languages, and speculative nature-writing — forging futures that acknowledge interdependence, decay, and resilience.

 

In the noise of disinformation, deepfakes, and disappearing facts, poetry can cut through. This pavilion asks how poetic language operates in a post-truth world — as resistance, disruption, or restoration. Works may explore the aesthetics of fragmentation, digital distortion, state censorship, surveillance, or the poetics of refusal.

 

Bodies are shifting. Borders blur. New pronouns emerge. In the age of AI-generated selfhood and algorithmic intimacy, this pavilion explores the poetic rendering of identities in flux. Queer poetics, trans narratives, cyborg logics, speculative embodiment — all welcome here. We seek the raw, the re-coded, the re-claimed.

 

How does poetry live in the world beyond the page? This pavilion highlights poetry as a tool for community-building, for occupying space, for shaping collective consciousness. From migrant collectives to indigenous poetics, from blockchain-based publications to DIY zines, from virtual readings to urban interventions — we invite work that makes poetry an infrastructure for justice, care, and connection.

 

Where do poems go when they unlearn their shape? This pavilion is dedicated to formal rebellion, aesthetic invention, and playful experimentation. From visual poetry to algorithmic generation, from erasure texts to embodied performance, from asemic writing to poetic code — we welcome works that stretch the limits of what a poem is or could be. Whether analogue or digital, chaotic or minimal, this is a space for the unruly, the uncontainable, the wild. Poetry as glitch, as deviation, as method of reimagining the very medium it inhabits.

 

In a world fraying at its edges, care becomes radical. This pavilion holds space for poetry that tends, listens, softens. Here, intimacy is not escapism but resistance; tenderness, not weakness but action. From letters to lovers and elegies for kin, to rituals of healing, friendship, and quiet resilience — we seek verses that mend. Whether focused on family, grief, community, motherhood, queer kinship, or the small gestures that keep us alive, this is poetry as balm, as breath, as a blueprint for gentler worlds.

 

We invite poets, performers, collectives, curators, literary institutions, publishers, festivals, and interdisciplinary artists to submit proposals, projects, and content for inclusion in Poetry Expo 2026.

 

- Readings or performances (video or audio)

- Video essays or poetic documentaries

- Experimental digital poetry / AI-generated poetics

- Sound works or voice-based installations

- Visual poetry / text-based art

- Multimedia collaborations or poetic interventions

 

 

- Length: Audio and video projects must not exceed 60 minutes

- Languages: All languages are welcome; English subtitles or a synopsis must accompany non-English submissions

- Formats: Content must be hosted via Vimeo, YouTube, or another embeddable platform

- Submissions per entrant: Maximum 2 entries

 

Deadline: 15th of December 2025

 

Poetry Expo 2026 is a not-for-profit initiative committed to visibility, accessibility, and the amplification of poetic voices. While we cannot provide universal compensation, we do offer:

 

- Global visibility across Versopolis channels and partner platforms

- Editorial features for selected projects

- A limited number of microgrants for translation or collaborative production

- A permanent presence in the Expo’s digital archive — an evolving poetic repository

 

This is more than an exhibition — it is a gathering of survival, a collective document of imagination, a field report from the frontlines of being. We write in the wake of the world, not as an ending, but as a beginning. Let this be where verses rise — torn, tangled, glowing.

 

Submit your proposal by 15 December 2025 through the Poetry Expo 2026 Application Form (click the link).

For additional information or partnership inquiries, please contact us at: poetryexpo@versopolis.com

 

Let the words survive. Let the verses begin.