2025 Keynote Speaker: Stephanie Burt

Photo by Civitella Ranieri 2019

Poetry by the Sea is thrilled to welcome Stephanie Burt as the Keynote speaker for our Tenth Anniversary Conference. The conference will run from Tuesday May 27 to Friday May 30, 2025, and the Keynote reading will take place on Wednesday, May 28 following the banquet. Books will be available for sale before and after the Keynote, and you are also welcome to bring books you already own for a brief signing after the event. Please see link for registration information.


Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with numerous published books, including critical books on poetry and four poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems in her most recent collection, We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022), were described in this way by Madeleine Wattenberg for The Georgia Review: “Oriented toward a queer futurity’s potential, these poems rarely land in certainty. Burt reminds us that the surface reflects to the observer just one story, one script, and when we dip below what initially appears, we meet numerous realms and ways of being as mysterious and lovely as the unknown that flourishes on the ocean floor.”