SARANAC LAKE — Four renowned spoken word poets — Noah Arhm Choi, Roya Marsh, Jos Olivarez, and Jon Sands — will perform their work at Poetry on Broadway, an event hosted by the Adirondack Center for Writing, on Thursday, Nov. 2 at 7 p.m.

The event will be held at ACW at 15 Broadway in Saranac Lake and is free and open to the public. Each poet’s books will be for sale at the event. A book signing will follow the performances.

Poetry on Broadway will give each poet the space to perform their work with energy and dynamism in an attempt to show the power of contemporary poetry. ACW wants the North Country to see poets not as solitary monks whose words rest in age-old tomes on dusty bookshelves, but as rock stars who can entertain, move, surprise, and delight audiences with their words and performance chops.

To accomplish this, ACW brings spoken word performers to the Adirondacks annually for the High School Writing Retreat held at Paul Smith’s College. The four poets featured at Poetry on Broadway on Nov. 2 are serving as the teaching faculty for the High School Writing Retreat. ACW has created the Poetry on Broadway event in order to provide the wider, all-ages Adirondack audience the chance to enjoy the work of these poets. Typically, ACW brings three poets for this event, but given that the 2023 High School Writing Retreat will welcome double the number of high schoolers that participated had last year, it was necessary to bring a fourth poet to teach.

Choi is the author of “CUT TO BLOOM,” the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Choi was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022, shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize, and received the 2021 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. A Lambda Literary Writer in Schools, they work as the director of the Progressive Teaching Institute at a school in New York City.

Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, “Citizen Illegal,” was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, “The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.” He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, “The Poetry Gods.” In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets and Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

A Bronx native, Marsh is a poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the author of “dayliGht” (MCDxFSG, 2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She is the co-founder of the Bronx Poet Laureate, a PEN America Emerging Voices Mentor and the awardee of the Lotus Foundation Prize for poetry.

Sands is a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, selected for his second book, “It’s Not Magic” (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the facilitator of the Emotional Historians workshop, a series of generative writing workshops. He teaches at Brooklyn College, Urban Word NYC, and for over a decade has facilitated a weekly writing workshop for adults at Baily House, an HIV/AIDS service center in East Harlem. He tours extensively as a poet, but lives in Brooklyn.