2025: A Big Year for the Grand River Poetry Collective
Hello everyone!
We’re not quite to the end of the year, but we’ve accomplished so much already, we want to pause and celebrate it with you!
When we posted “Big Plans for 2025” back in January, we said we wanted to make local poetry more permanent, more visible, and easier to share. We hoped to get our first titles into the world, build community events, and be transparent about how grassroots publishing can work here in Grand Rapids.
Here at the end of November, the Grand River Poetry Collective and Grand River Poetry Press had done all of that and more. Here’s a look at what we accomplished together.
1. A Local Poetry Press Comes Fully to Life
In 2025, Grand River Poetry Press moved from “idea” to “ecosystem.” We didn’t just release one book—we launched a small shelf of titles, all tied to Grand Rapids poets and our wider literary community.
New books published so far in 2025:
Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971–2024 by David Cope
A definitive, career-spanning collection from a major American poet, published August 1, 2025. It gathers over five decades of work, from early anti-war poems to late visionary meditations—a “final statement” from a central figure in our region’s poetry history.
There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy by Barbara Saunier
Published in late July 2025, this collection moves through barns, kitchens, and fields, holding grief and wonder together with unflinching clarity. It’s deeply rooted in rural life and the “sacraments of decay” that become song.
Love Garden at the End of the World by Christine Stephens-Krieger
The debut collection by the Grand Rapids Poet Laureate, released September 30, 2025. These poems are steeped in dunes, lakes, gardens, and the raw terrain of love, loss, and transformation—bringing the Poet Laureate’s long-standing community work into book form.
Jungle Gyms for Monkey Minds by Neil Kaufman
Published in October 2025, Kaufman’s debut is a “utility poetry book” for restless, associative thinkers—a nonlinear collection that rewards flipping around, finding recurring images, and letting the connections land over time.
Certain Lightnings by Scott Krieger
Scott’s debut poetry collection should arrive in time for the reading on December 11. Scott helped serve as a midwife to these books, including his own, a chronicle of a series of electric certainties that make up one life and love.
By year’s end, Grand River Poetry Press will have at least six 2025 titles in print, all published under a no- or low-up-front-cost model that directs proceeds back to poets and back into the work of the collective. We hope we demonstrate that a love + determination + fastidiousness can do anything.
We’ve also expanded a network of contacts with local businesses, coming up with creative ways poetry can both serve the community and find safe places to happen. Bookstores of all sorts including Argos Book Store, Schuler Books, Grammotones, and Black Dog Books, to name just a few, have supported us by stocking our titles and hosting events. We’re all part of the same ecosystem and we’re glad the collective can help serve as a way to communicate the diverse needs of the poetry community. Bookstores, bars, coffeehouses, libraries, galleries, community theatres, liberated art spaces, writing groups, poetry appreciation societies, each provides a space where poetry can happen and more minds to comprehend. We’re grateful for the audience we build together.
We also continued to expand our online “Books” and “Store” sections, giving readers a central place to find local poetry, including both new releases and reprints. This extends beyond just the books we publish to titles by local authors, and cultural items of regional interest. We want to help reveal a sensibility that is unique to our region, made of a shared language.
We celebrate poets wherever we find them and poets are always welcome to bring us their books for an equitable arrangement to share their titles on our website and at book table events. We hope to be able to sell a range of titles from the Parlor at the Lit. Reach out to us on the contact form or just come to our next event with a stack of titles and introduce yourself. We’ve made many new friends like Camille Newsom and R.R. Tavarez whose books have become quite popular within the collective. That’s real culture happening! We’re grateful for the path that helped you find us.
If you are a West Michigan author with a full length manuscript in the works, we look forward to hearing your voice! If you need help getting it into print, contact us to learn more about our poetry manuscript cohort and how to get involved. If you live in the area, you speak our language! We can understand one another.
2. A Festival that Says: “Poetry is LIT”
On June 20, 2025, we hosted GR Poetry… is LIT!—a full-day poetry festival at the Wealthy Theatre Annex as part of GR Lit Fest. An event that would not have been possible without the key partnership with GR MIFI and Shayna "Akanke" Marie who took us all at our word and made it happen. And we all showed up and we made it happen!
The festival ran from 10:00am to 10:00pm and included:
Juneteenth breakfast + storytelling reception (“Breaking Bread, Building Bridges”)
A Family Tree / Family Truths oral history recording booth
Chapbook and zine-making stations to help people leave with something they’d made themselves
Open mics featuring poets from across Grand Rapids
A panel discussion on community publishing, including the collective’s goal to publish at least 100 local poets
An evening film screening of The Negro Artist, a documentary on Caleb Rainey and the power of Black artistry
The festival brought together poets, storytellers, small-press folks, and families—exactly the kind of cross-community conversation we hoped to spark when we first imagined the collective.
3. A Year of Conversations About Publishing
2025 wasn’t just about putting books on shelves—it was also about talking openly, in public, about how local publishing can work.
GRAM Panel: Visionnaire Series
On April 24, 2025, the Grand Rapids Art Museum hosted a Visionnaire Series panel featuring the Grand River Poetry Collective. Moderated by Poet Laureate Christine Stephens-Krieger, the event explored:
The state of publishing in Grand Rapids
The production process behind Small Gestures
How a community-driven press can support poets long term
Panelists included Scott Krieger, David Cope, John Winkelman, Donna Munro, and Shayna Haynes Heard—bringing together poets, publishers, editors, and teaching artists in one conversation about how we can make books here.
WGVU Feature: Filling the Gap
Just before the festival, WGVU News ran a feature on the collective, highlighting our mission to “fill gaps” in the Grand Rapids poetry landscape by creating a communal hub and a publishing house for local poets.
In that interview, we talked publicly about:
Our no- to low-cost publishing model
Our commitment to prioritizing Grand Rapids poets, especially those without books
Launching a 10-poet manuscript cohort to work toward publication together
These conversations helped put local poetry and local publishing on the regional radar, and they invited more people into the work.
4. A Pop-Up Reading Room During ArtPrize: The Hermitage at Diamond
Another highlight of 2025 was The Hermitage at Diamond readings during Artprize, a pop-up poetry sanctuary we held during ArtPrize. For two weeks, the space became a quiet refuge in the middle of the city—part reading room, part micro-gallery, part contemplative hideout for anyone who needed a moment to breathe.
The Hermitage welcomed hundreds of visitors, many of whom had never encountered the collective before. People wandered in from the street, sat with books by local poets, participated in poetry workshops and lingered in conversations that ranged from grief to wild creativity to the future of Grand Rapids arts. We stocked the room with local titles, hosted readings and open mics, and created a space where poetry could be encountered gently, without performance pressure.
The response was overwhelming. It reminded us that sometimes the most powerful thing a collective can offer is simply a space to be heard. We plan to expand the Hermitage concept during future citywide events.
5. Finding a Home at The Lit
In 2025, The Lit (the historic Ladies’ Literary Club at 61 Sheldon) became a true home base for our in-person programming.
On October 30, 2025, we held a Grand River Poetry Collective Salon at the Lit, where attendees picked up multiple GRPC books and discussed the forthcoming reading series. These Salons are likely to become a regular event where poets can gather and socialize as well as plan and coordinate activities together.
On November 13, 2025, we launched the Poetry Reading Series at The Lit with an evening featuring David Cope (Moonlight Rose in Blue) and Melissa Wray (Small Gestures), plus a 5:30pm open mic and a 7:30–8:00pm signing. The event was free and open to the public, and promoted across our website, Facebook, and local event listings. We had about 60 attendees which was a marvelous warm room of poets and personalities. We were treated well by our production partners at the Lit and the open mic was truly awesome. The quality of work people are bringing forth is a testament to how much pent humanity is so urgent to burst forth.
These meetings and readings, paired with open mic opportunities, gave emerging poets stage time alongside authors whose books we’ve helped bring into the world—exactly the ecosystem we want to keep building. There are opportunities to find mentors, and for the retired wise ones of our community to continue to bring it forth to the people of Grand Rapids. See some of the media from the event.
6. Growing Visibility and Community
Beyond books and marquee events, 2025 also brought a steady rise in visibility and community engagement:
Local bloggers and reviewers began to treat the collective as part of the regular literary landscape—writing about our festival, our meetings, and our new titles as they arrived.
Our website grew to include dedicated Authors and Books pages, plus a Store, News, and Events hub—making it easier for people to find, support, and return to Grand Rapids poetry.
Integrated the site with the collective’s broader ecosystem — events at The Lit, new book launches, and the festival — creating a single hub where readers can find out what the collective is doing.
Social channels and newsletters carry news of new releases, festival updates, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of a volunteer-driven, community-centered press. We’re now on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
All of this reinforced the same message: poetry is not a side project in Grand Rapids—it’s a living, shared practice, and there’s now an infrastructure to support it.
7. Launching The River: A Digital Home for West Michigan Literature
Another major milestone in 2025 was the quiet but decisive launch of The River at theriverlit.com — a platform built to host the region’s literary work in a way that’s living, collaborative, and always expanding.
So far we’ve:
Created The Feature, a rotating spotlight showcasing the work of established and emerging poets featured in the Reading Series.
Created The Current, a home for works that need to be heard right away, while people are still looking for answers to our communal questions.
Laid the groundwork for taking submissions for anthologies and larger collaborative projects both in print and online. The submission portal will be an important part of future plans for anthologies and theme driven collaborations.
Added a share tool that generates images from favorite selections from poems so creators and poetry lovers can broadcast their content with style.
Throughout the coming year we hope to:
Published monthly features, including essays, poems, reviews, interviews, and columns from local writers.
The River is built to grow with the collective: a place where our print books, live events, and community voices converge into one ongoing conversation.
8. Looking Ahead
At the start of 2025, we said we wanted to:
Make it easier to find and read local poets
Create a sustainable, community-owned publishing model
Build events that connect poets, readers, and organizations across the city
By the end of the year, we are:
Running a local press with multiple 2025 titles in print
Hosting festivals, panels, and reading series in partnership with venues like the Wealthy Theatre Annex, GRAM, Hermitage at Diamond, and The Lit
Supporting cohorts of poets actively shaping their manuscripts toward publication
Learning the entire life cycle of publication together as a community
The network of open mics scattered around the city is truly remarkable. If you want to go to a poetry event in Grand Rapids, there is probably one today or tomorrow where you can be powerfully moved by fresh voices speaking from lived experience. As a poet, local or visiting, you will find a receptive audience for your work and best of all, make new friends, find allies, build community.
We’ve also found cross-disciplinary allies along the way. Through Ekphrastic workshops, we’ve met exception local artists whose thoughtful work inspires. We’ve also met sensitive jazz artists eager to explore how language and music can hear into one another.
Today, poets are getting paid for their poetry and getting read and heard in their own community. This is what we’re here for. Poetry is our most powerful use of language and it’s available to each of us for no cost of entry. You can be heard and read and respected for your voice by a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, bundle of hearts, right here, right now.
In other words, the “big plans” are no longer just plans. They’re here, in the form of books, events, relationships, and a growing sense that Grand Rapids poetry has a home, a press, and a future.
Here’s to everything we built together in 2025—and to the voices we’ll lift up next!
—Scott and Christine
