Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future and Incantation for Future: Closing Headliner & Portal Closing

This poetry portal explores the wound not as an end, but as a powerful beginning. Join us for a journey where language becomes a site of transformation—where grief, memory, and survival are not just revisited, but reimagined. Mimi Tempestt breaks open conventions with a voice that insists on reclamation and the sacredness of Black queer futurity. Her work spirals through personal and collective histories, creating a radical space for becoming. Salvadoran poet Marian Urquilla mines personal and political terrain, forging poems that speak to displacement, resilience, and empowerment. With precision and heart, her language gives shape to survival. James Cagney, PEN Oakland award-winner and recipient of the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award, delivers poems that honor vulnerability and rage in equal measure. His work reverberates with ancestral echoes and present-day urgency. Together, these poets wield poetry as a technology of resilience and a tool for new world-building. In their hands, the wound becomes a map—leading us toward a future where we do more than survive. We thrive. We bloom.

As the poetry stage draws to a close, we will gather for one final invocation—a moment to honor what has been conjured, created, and carried forward. Incantation for Future is both a celebration and a spell for what comes next. Legendary writer and cultural icon joins us as our closing headliner, offering a rare reading that reaches across generations, geographies, and genres. Her work, rooted in the mythic, the historical, and the personal, has long opened portals for those navigating identity, exile, and transformation.

In this culminating moment, Maxine Hong Kingston offers not just a reading, but a blessing—an incantation for futures rooted in justice, storytelling, and radical interconnectedness. Her presence reminds us that language shapes the world, that memory is a map, and that poetry is a path toward liberation. Together, we will close the portal not with finality, but with intention—carrying the words, visions, and reverberations of the festival into the world beyond. Let this be our collective offering to the future.