Poetry Expo 27
Call for Proposals
What does it take for a voice to reach another person?
A poem crosses a border. A language finds a reader beyond the community that speaks it. A familiar word becomes strange in someone else’s mouth. Somewhere, a voice is interrupted; elsewhere, another carries it forward.
We are delighted to announce the fifth edition of Poetry Expo, Versopolis’s international digital poetry fair. Since its launch in 2023, the Expo has brought together poets, artists, organisations and audiences from around the world. In 2027, it turns towards the encounters that make literature possible: between speaking and listening, writing and translating, offering a poem and receiving an unexpected answer.
About Poetry Expo 2027
Under the theme “Against the Echo – A World of Voices,” Poetry Expo 2027 asks how poetry can open our attention to experiences beyond those we already recognise. Who is able to speak, and who is heard? What happens when a voice is translated, reproduced, suppressed or claimed by someone else? How can we encounter one another without demanding that every difference become familiar?
Words can travel widely while remaining within familiar circles. Recommendations return us to established preferences; public conversations settle into repeated positions; a voice becomes recognisable through the very qualities an audience expects it to repeat. Poetry can disturb these patterns. An unfamiliar rhythm, an unresolved image or a shift in perspective can change how we read—and what we become willing to consider.
Poetry itself lives through echoes: remembered voices, oral traditions, borrowed phrases and conversations with earlier poets. Each encounter can transform what it carries. A translation opens another meaning. A performance changes the force of a line. A reader finds something its author could not have anticipated.
Against the Echo explores this possibility of an answer that introduces a difference. Its questions extend into everyday life: the languages we speak, the stories we inherit, the communities we form and the ways we represent ourselves to others.
A fully digital, open and globally accessible exhibition, Poetry Expo 2027 welcomes poetry that argues, whispers, sings, unsettles and surprises. Across five thematic pavilions, contributors are invited to explore the many ways a voice can take shape and find its audience.
Together, these contributions will create a meeting place for voices that retain their differences while discovering what they might say to one another.
Thematic Pavilions – Poetry Expo 2027
The pavilions offer broad starting points for participation. Contributions may engage with one or several themes through their subject matter, artistic form, creative process or relationship with an audience.
1. Tongues in Motion – Languages and Translation
What travels when a poem enters another language, and what asks to remain untranslated?
This pavilion explores translation, multilingual writing, dialects, sign languages and the languages carried through migration and across generations. It welcomes work in minoritised and Indigenous languages, alongside projects that connect different literary traditions. Contributions may include readings, translation exchanges, conversations or collaborations that reveal how words change between contexts—and how languages shape our understanding of place, identity and belonging.
2. Whose Voice? – Authorship and Technology
What makes a voice recognisable, and how does it become our own?
This pavilion explores how poetry is created, influenced, shared and transformed. From literary inheritance, quotation and collective writing to AI, synthetic speech and digital media, it invites contributions that investigate the relationship between a work and its makers. Projects may experiment with new tools, revisit existing texts, question originality or explore how technologies influence expression, circulation and access. Questions of authorship and creative agency sit alongside the possibilities of adaptation, collaboration and invention.
3. Freedom to Speak – Voices and Communities
Who finds a platform, and what does it take to be heard?
This pavilion welcomes work engaging with freedom of expression, identity, gender, inequality and belonging. Contributions may address censorship, exclusion or the pressures that shape what people feel able to say. They may also explore how poetry creates opportunities for participation and exchange: through festivals, collectives, publishing, workshops or community projects. From individual poems to presentations of literary initiatives, we welcome contributions that expand the range of voices in public life and bring writers and audiences into conversation.
4. Stories We Carry – Memory and Everyday Worlds
How does poetry change what we notice, remember and imagine?
This pavilion brings together work exploring everyday life, personal and collective histories, family narratives, myths and relationships with place. Contributions may attend to working routines, urban and rural landscapes, ecological relationships or experiences that usually pass unexamined. They may revisit an inherited story, recover an overlooked perspective or imagine a different way of living. Through observation, humour, speculation or invention, poetry can reveal unfamiliar possibilities within the worlds we inhabit.
5. Beyond the Page – Performance and Experiment
What happens when a poem becomes an event?
This pavilion follows poetry into spoken word, oral traditions, song, gesture, signed performance, movement and visual expression. It explores how rhythm, physical presence, sound, image and space shape meaning, and how digital formats carry or transform these qualities. We welcome readings, poetry films, sound works, visual poetry, participatory projects and collaborations between poets, musicians, dancers and other artists. Both established practices and formal experiments can reveal new ways of encountering a poem.
How to Get Involved
We invite poets, performers, translators, collectives, curators, literary institutions, publishers, festivals and interdisciplinary artists to submit proposals, projects and content for inclusion in Poetry Expo 2027.
Formats may include:
- Poetry readings and performances in video or audio
- Poetry films, video essays and poetic documentaries
- Sound works, spoken-word pieces and voice-based experiments
- Visual poetry, animation and text-based art
- Translation projects and multilingual readings
- Experimental digital poetry, including projects engaging with AI
- Multimedia collaborations and participatory works
- Recorded conversations, workshops and presentations of literary initiatives
Contributions may range from a single reading to a collaborative project or a presentation of an organisation’s work. Both existing and newly created material are welcome.
The theme offers a shared point of departure, with room for different interpretations. Contributors are invited to select the pavilion or pavilions that best reflect their work and briefly describe the connection.
Submission Guidelines
- Length: Audio and video projects must not exceed 60 minutes.
- Languages: All languages are welcome. English subtitles or an English synopsis must accompany non-English submissions.
- Formats: Content must be hosted on Vimeo, YouTube or another platform that allows embedding on the Expo website.
- Submissions per entrant: A maximum of two entries.
- Deadline: 15th December 2026
Support and Recognition
Poetry Expo 2027 is a not-for-profit initiative committed to accessibility, international exchange and the visibility of diverse poetic practices. While we cannot provide compensation for every contribution, participating projects will benefit from:
1) Presentation within the Poetry Expo digital exhibition
2) Promotion of the programme through Versopolis channels and partner networks
3) Opportunities for editorial features on selected projects
4) Inclusion in the Expo’s digital archive
A limited number of microgrants for translation or collaborative production may be offered, subject to confirmed funding.
Bring a Voice. Make Room for Another.
A poem enters a conversation whose participants it cannot fully know. It may reach someone far beyond its original language, setting or audience. In that encounter, its words acquire another context—and the conversation changes.
For its fifth edition, Poetry Expo invites you to contribute to that exchange: through a poem, a performance, a collaboration or the work of a literary community. Together, these contributions will open different routes through a world of voices.
To Apply
Submit your proposal by 15th of December through the Poetry Expo 2027 Application Form.
Poetry Expo 2027
Against the Echo
A World of Voices
For additional information or partnership inquiries, please contact poetryexpo@versopolis.com.
