The Kalamazoo Poetry Festival, first held in 2014, has since grown and thrived, featuring poets from the Kalamazoo community as well as from across the nation. This year, Casey Grooten has been named first executive director of the Festival, helping to make it grow – perhaps embracing all literary arts, not just poetry.
“I’m coming up on a year in May of being the first full-year-round executive director,” Grooten says. “The position was created because since our inception … we’ve been a volunteer-run board. That was great in a lot of ways, but over the last few years, we’ve realized we needed to find a staff person and find the capacity to pay—and we created it.”
Grooten grew up in nearby Gobles, Michigan. They (Grooten identifies as they/them) received their bachelor’s degree in creative writing at Western Michigan University, and now calls themself an interdisciplinary artist, as they work in literature, visual art, and music. Poetry is arguably their greatest love.
“Poetry has this healing quality,” they say. “Not to get too personal, but when I was 18 through 21—I’m 35 now—I struggled with a lot of issues. When I took my first poetry class, that was in that same six-month semester period. That was when I obtained my first stable housing situation. I’ve been sober for 14 years this coming April. I was able to find a job and tweak my friend group into something more healthy. I directly correlate that to poetry being introduced into my life."
As Grooten and others prepare for the coming Poetry Festival throughout April, they say the hope is to expand beyond poetry to include all genres of literary and other arts.
“As we grow, we are having conversations that we might have to change our name to make it more applicable to what we do,” Grooten says. “We want to make sure fiction writers know that they are welcome here, make sure visual artists and musicians know that they are welcome here … Our organization’s focus is making sure that every voice can be heard here. What that means to me is that we lift up voices that may not have been heard. From that whiteness, trying to move and become more diverse, which I think is what makes health happen. Not just in organizations, but diversity on the planet means healthy planet.”
The 2025 Kalamazoo Poetry Festival begins on April 5 with a youth poetry workshop, a celebration of community poets on April 24, an open mic on April 25, and workshops and readings on April 26. Visit the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival events page for more information.
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