Poetry with Prakriti: a brand new avataar

Prakriti Foundation's Poetry with Prakriti festival is responding to travel and public gathering restrictions by reinventing itself as an online festival, with readings on Zoom, on the first three Saturdays of every month, starting October 2020 and running up to September next 2021 from 7 p.m. IST.

The poets featured will be a mix of well-loved names and emerging voices, in English and other languages, from India and abroad. The format is to have one poet on each evening, to read their poems for 15 minutes or thereabouts, followed by around 15 minutes of answering questions from the audience.

I’m helping out with the festival in a couple of ways: acting as moderator for the Q&A sessions that will follow each reading, and in outreach.

Here’s how you (and any poetry-loving folks you know and care to forward this to) can get notified of who is reading and when.
1. You can sign up for updates at https://groups.google.com/group/poetrywithprakriti. (This is a one-way newsgroup. I.e., there will only be emails from the admins, who are Meera Krishnan of Prakriti Foundation and I, and no back-and-forth chatter. There will be three emails a month, approximately, telling you who the poet reading the following Saturday will be, and giving you the registration link.)
2. Or, email Meera at prakritifoundation at gmail and she’ll add you to their mailing list.
3. Or if you’d prefer your updates on WhatsApp, please contact Meera or me with your phone number, or email her at the same address.

On social media, you can follow Prakriti Foundation on
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
If you could amplify posts on those platforms, we would be very grateful.

And yes, please share this with friends whom you think might be interested.

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Prakriti Foundation is an arts and culture NGO in Chennai (India), founded in 1998. In a city accustomed to a regular diet of classical performance, Prakriti has been the space where scholars, researchers, artists, critics, poets, and filmmakers have been able to present their work to those who engage with it on serious terms. One of its four annual festivals, Poetry with Prakriti, features eminent and emerging poets (from India and abroad), with each presenting four different readings of their poems to small, intimate audiences at several venues in the city: schools, colleges, cafes, galleries, boutiques, banks, IT parks, green public parks, and other commercial establishments.