The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center

Founded in 1997, The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College has a core mission to bring poets of national and international stature to campus to inspire students and the Smith community. All events are free and open to the public. See the News, Events & Community page to keep up-to-date on our current season and announcements.

Explore the Poetry Center

About the Center

Raven Fowlkes-Witten in The Poetry Center

News, Events & Community

Group of people attending a Poetry Center event

Visiting Poets

Alumnae Poets

High School Poetry Prize

Photo of journal with the written word "poetry"

Poetry Concentration

Current Season Poets

torrin a. greathouse

Jai Hamid Bashir

Jennifer Funk

Ari Banias

John Murillo

Nicole Sealey

Tobias Wray

Nine Syllables Press

About the Press

Nine Syllables Press is a chapbook press created by Adrie Rose (AC ‘22) in partnership with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. We seek to address ongoing inequity by providing a new platform for systematically excluded voices, including but not limited to women, BIPOC, and trans/LGBTQIA++ poets. 9SP is currently the only press at a historic women’s college in the US.

Smith students are intimately involved in every part of the press, learning about all aspects of the editorial process and the publishing industry along the way.

Chapbook Contest

Each fall, students in The Chapbook in Practice: Publishing read the manuscripts submitted to our annual contest, learn about the publishing industry, and narrow down the manuscripts to a top ten. Those top ten get sent on to our final judge, who selects the winner.

Each spring, students enrolled in The Chapbook in Practice: Design study book design and production. Each student creates an interior design and cover design for the winning chapbook. In spring ‘23, Amelia Burton designed the cover for our first printed volume, an anthology of women poets writing about the body.

We received almost 300 submissions our first year, and final judge Leila Chatti selected

Desire/Halves by Jai Hamid Bashir as the 2023 winner. Chatti describes Desire/Halves as “a lush read of infinite tenderness.” The cover for Desire/Halves was designed by Margaret Valle ‘26.

My Hand Holding Tight My Other Hand

In this premiere anthology from Nine Syllables Press, nine contemporary poets embrace complexity and ambiguity, the uncomfortable realities of navigating intersectional womanhood, and reach for connection across experience. This collection creates space for both individual expression and collective catharsis. Featuring nine of the most distinguished voices in poetry today, it will change the way you look at yourself and the world.

Edited by Adrie Rose. Contributions by Victoria Chang, Tiana Clark, Camille T. Dungy, torrin a. greathouse, Ada Limón, Layli Long Soldier, Aurielle Marie, Molly McCully Brown, and Sarah Vap.

Learn More About the Press

“The Poem I Wish I Had Read” Series

We’re excited to announce the launch of “The Poem I Wish I Had Read,” a video series in which acclaimed poets discuss and read a single poem that they wish they had encountered as a teenager. In each of these video testimonials, poets talk about who they were as high school students, why reading these poems would have been transformational for them, and how these works altered their sense of what a poem can be. Enjoy the following featured videos, and check out the full series on our YouTube channel.—Matt Donovan

Broadsides

The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center offers a series of fine letterpress broadsides signed by the poets and designed and illustrated by Barry Moser, printer to the college.

BROADSIDES GALLERY