Call for Proposals

Poetry’s Environments  (June 9-11 2026)

Poetry shapes and transforms experiences and attitudes toward nature and ecology, just as the natural environment maps the poetic imagination. Poetry roots itself in the environment of the breath, the voice, the hand, and the ear. It roams over pages of books and across digital, computational, performative, archival, monumental, and ephemeral landscapes. Poetry emerges and resides in institutional and ad hoc ecosystems, and it sounds and senses within and without the body of the poet, the audience, the blade of grass.

Poetry’s Environments seeks proposals from international poets, critics, translators, archivists, activists, textual editors, digital specialists, literary professionals, and individuals, groups and organisations involved in poetry and its environments. The conference aims to consider poetry that addresses the natural environment and the environments in which poetry is written, experienced, performed, preserved, and studied. We are especially interested in proposals that consider these two contexts together.

If poetry ‘makes us feel things’, how does it move beyond acting as mood music for crisis and collapse and offer the ‘means to live through [its] making’ (Viktor Shklovsky)?

Keynotes & plenaries include Simon Armitage & more exciting speakers to be announced soon.

The conference will be held at Cloth Hall Court, the University's state-of-the-art conference centre in the heart of the city, and Clothworker's Centenary Concert Hall on the University of Leeds campus. The deadline for proposals is 5th December.