Poetry Off the Page: International Advances in Poetry Performance Research is an open access peer-reviewed digital collection featuring new work in poetry performance research from around the globe. It attends to diverse aspects, geographies, and constituents of contemporary poetry performance cultures and the flows between them, and showcases a range of approaches to spoken poetry.

In recent decades, poetry performance has been one of the fastest growing arts practices internationally. Since movements such as Beat poetry, jazz poetry, and poetry slam have inspired performance scenes across the English-speaking world and beyond, innovative performance styles have emerged alongside new genres and styles of composition geared towards oral performance. The global reach of spoken word poetry has become highly noticeable in the arena of slam, evidenced by the diverse programmes of initiatives such as the 2005 ‘Poetry International World Slampionship’ in Rotterdam, the ‘Coupe du Monde de Poésie’ in France (since 2007), and the recently established ‘World Poetry Slam Organization’ (2012). The popularity of performed poetry has also been aided by the emergence of numerous national and international spoken word festivals – the Basque ‘Ahoz Aho’ Festival, the ‘Shoko’ International Spoken Word & Hip Hop Festival in Zimbabwe, and ‘Spoken Fest’ in India are just three cases in point here – and it has been fueled, of course, by rapidly evolving media technologies. Today, spoken poetry is flourishing on the World Wide Web, granting us digitally mediated access to poetic voices and attracting audiences far beyond the reach of most contemporary print publishers of poetry. Moreover, as a practice of declaiming, staging, and questioning identities, poetry performance has intersected with vital cultural and socio-political discourses across the globe. Poetry Off the Page: International Advances in Poetry Performance Research aims to provide a necessary focal point for new research on contemporary poetry performance and spoken word poetry from around the globe, attending to local/national practices as well as transnational movements. Fields of investigation might include: 

*   Spoken-word poetry and its relationship with the visual arts/music/dance/performance art/theatre/comedy

*   The multiple heritages of contemporary spoken word poetry

*   Avant-garde poetic performances since the 1960s and their use of diverse media

*   Thinking poetry performance with/against technology

*   Spoken-word poetry’s relation with digital media

*   Formats and genres of oral poetry performance (slam, open mic, poetry trails, spoken word theatre, one-person show, rap, poetry films, spoken word clips,…)

*   Poetry performance communities, coteries, audiences

*   Spoken word poetry and/as creative industry

*   Poetry, identity, and social justice: performed poetry and its relationship with race, ethnicity,  gender, ability, heritage, …

*   Advances in spoken word pedagogy

*   Methods of poetry performance research, historiography and archiving

*   Poetry performance and critical/ cultural/ literary theory

Under the editorship of Shefali Banerji (University of Vienna), Dr. Rachel Bolle-Debessay (University of Vienna) and Assoc. Prof. Julia Lajta-Novak (University of Vienna), and published by the Open Library of Humanities Journal(Editors-in-Chief, Dr. Caroline Edwards and Dr. Rose Harris-Birtilll; Managing Editor, Dr. Simon Everett), Poetry Off the Page: International Advances in Poetry Performance Researchaims to shed light on the aesthetics, politics, medialities and histories of performed poetry across the globe, and to advance the theory and methodology of poetry performance studies.

We welcome innovative, scholarly articles that are engaging, substantially researched and thought-provoking. Contributions from researchers of all career stages are welcome, and we especially encourage submissions from scholars around the globe.

All submissions will be double-anonymously peer reviewed and assessed by external readers.

Submission Guidelines

All manuscripts must be submitted to the editors at popconf2025@univie.ac.at for initial assessment. Please provide the following as part of your submission: Title, abstract (250 words), short bio (100 words), up to 6 keywords, article (max. 8,000 words, clearly identifying source texts/recordings & methodologies/critical approaches), references, list of figures, acknowledgements & declaration of interest statement. Should your manuscript be taken further by the editorial team, any rights that are required for works reproduced in your research that are not cited or referenced from freely available sources will need to be included with the permission of the copyright holder. The permissions (and any associated costs) for the reproduction of these works will be the author's responsibility to obtain.

Word Length for Critical Articles: 8,000 words (excluding references).

Deadline for Submissions:  21 November 2025

Reference Style: Harvard. Please refer to the author guidelines!

Author Guidelines: https://olh.openlibhums.org/site/author-guidelines/

Contact Details: If you have any queries, please contact popconf2025@univie.ac.at.

The editors aim to respond to submissions within two months of receipt.

Inclusivity: Poetry Off the Page is committed to publishing work that advocates social justice, equality, diversity and inclusion.

For more information about the Poetry Off the Page project, visit https://poetryoffthepage.net/