Sarah Ford has directed Baylor University’s Beall Poetry Festival since 2018. The festival is an annual three-day celebration of contemporary poetry, with readings, a panel discussion, and the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture on Contemporary Poetry.
The festival is supported by the John A. and DeLouise McClelland Beall Endowed Fund, which was established in 1994 by Mrs. Virginia Beall Ball of Muncie, Ind., to honor her parents and to encourage the writing and appreciation of poetry.
Poetry has a long and illustrious history at Baylor. Under the direction of Baylor professor A. J. Armstrong, poets such as Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, and William Butler Yeats visited Baylor to read their poems. Previous Beall Poetry Festival participants have included winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as several U.S. poet laureates.
The 30th Beall Poetry Festival will take place March 27-30, 2024 and will feature five special guests: Rebecca Gayle Howell, Major Jackson, Ruben Quesada, Tracy K. Smith, and Allison Benis White. For more information about the festival, see the festival’s website.
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For several years, Beall Poetry hosted Lisa Russ Spaar as the Beall Fall Visiting Poet. Spaar serves as Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her most recent collection of poems is Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (2021). Her other books of poetry include Orexia (2017), Vanitas, Rough (2012), Satin Cash (2008), Blue Venus (2004), and Glass Town (1999). During her visits, she gave lectures, performed poetry readings, and had individual meetings with students registered for our poetry workshop class. The next visiting poet will be at Baylor fall 2024.