Harvardâs annual Arts First Festival, one of the largest collegiate arts festivals in the country that showcases performers across diverse genres and spaces, is gearing up for its second consecutive year in a virtual format starting Monday.
The 2020 festival took place after Harvard shut down campus last March due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, artmakers at Harvard have found new ways to create a memorable experience in locations around the world.
âLast year, we did a small virtual festival, but because all the closing happened in the middle of March, there was very little time to really do what weâve done this year,â said Jack Megan, the director of Harvardâs Office of the Arts.
Narrative magazine publishes works by established and emerging writers. Their annual Tell Me A Story high school writing competition is usually an essay contest, but this year was open to poetry submissions. Westminster senior Sarah Lao was this year’s first prize winner with her poem “Triptych.” Lao was also the 2020 Teen Georgia Poet Laureate.
Salvadoran poet and former Narrative prize-winner Javier Zamora worked with each of the contest finalists when revising their works. “Javier is just so brilliant. When we were talking about my work, he let me first ask questions I had about this poem and where I should revise it. Surprisingly, we had very different questions and concerns about this poem. And I think that’s largely because I spent a very long time on this poem and Javier really helped me hone into what might have been a weaker part and how to fix that,” said Lao. She continued, “I also really loved talking to him about poetry and the life of a poet in general.