April may be the cruelest month, according to poet T.S. Eliot, but it’s a big month for the written word. Since 1996, it has been celebrated as National Poetry Month in the U.S., and it also contains Drop Everything and Read Day (April 12), World Book and Copyright Day (April 23), and Independent Bookstore Day (April 25). Capital Region readers can join the celebration at events highlighting local poets, publishers and more.

Sacramento Book Festival

The Sacramento Book Festival, hosted by the Sacramento branch of the California Writers Club, is set to take place April 19 at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center. This is the festival’s third year, with co-chair and local author J. Scott Coatsworth saying the event has grown significantly since its test run at McKinley Park Farmers Market in 2024.

“It wasn’t crazy busy, but the people that came bought books, so there’d be times where no one was walking by, but in four hours we still sold like 20 books per booth,” Coatsworth says. “Obviously there was a hunger for it, so we decided to do the real thing and set up to run the festival this last year.”

That second event featured over 130 authors, while this year’s has grown to feature over 270. One returning author from last year is Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson, a children’s book writer and illustrator based in Roseville.

“The wonderful thing about doing festivals like this is getting to meet readers and potential readers,” Fujimoto-Johnson says. “I found this festival was very diverse in the sense there were so many authors of different backgrounds. I felt like it was a very inclusive space, and that’s super important to me personally.”

In addition to author panels and readings, the event features food trucks, coffee vendors and a passport stamp hunt. The latter offers prizes that include season passes to B Street Theatre and free dinners at Zocalo, among others.

Sacramento Book Crawl

The Sacramento Book Crawl is a three-day event held across various bookstores to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day. Taking place April 24-26, the book crawl is organized by Read the Region, a collective of various independent bookstores in the Sacramento area.

“This will be our sixth year as a group celebrating Independent Bookstore Day as a collaborative of indie bookstores here in Sacramento,” says Sue Richards, owner of Crawford’s Books. “Read the Region began as a way for us to celebrate each other but also let people in Sacramento know we have a pretty thriving independent bookstore community and explore the other stores in a really fun way.”

There will be 14 bookstores participating in the crawl this year, and readers who make purchases at these shops can enter into a raffle for prize baskets valued around $200 in goods, including various gift certificates and bookstore merch.

“We used to have a minimum payment of $10 to get into the raffle, but when we had 10 stores that was $100, which is asking a lot of people,” Richards said. “It’s really just showing up, participating and coming out to support the events and authors that really matters.”

Richards notes that Independent Bookstore Day is generally the busiest day of the year for Crawford’s.

“My sales quadrupled for the day,” Richards says. “This really helps us as bookstores, because you’ve got Christmas and then a slump, and this kind of gets us up until summer. It’s at least 200 to 300 people, and that’s just at my store.”

Sacramento Poetry Center

The Sacramento Poetry Center holds its Sacramento Poetry Week in October, but it has plenty planned for National Poetry Month. President Patrick Grizzell says there will be a focus on education around poetry.

“We have several additional workshops going on this month, one being the haiku workshop,” Grizzell says. “It’s being put on by a poet named Vincent Kobelt, who is a teacher and has been working with this idea of adding a graphic element to it, a flipbook, as part of teaching people about haiku.” Grizzell says the haiku workshop, set for April 22 at the center, is a fun, educational, all-ages event.

The poetry center will also hold an April 26 workshop on cordels — inexpensive, often homemade literary pamphlets sold in Brazil since the 1930s — hosted by award-winning poet and novelist Mary Mackey. Mackey will read some cordels and help attendees make their own.

“The cordel is kind of an early version of a zine, very often a political statement or a political poem handcrafted by common folks,” Grizzell says. “People do like to make zines these days; it seems to be a real big deal, so we’ll be teaching people how to do this.”

Grizzell says the center is also preparing for the 40th anniversary of Sacramento Poetry Day (now Sacramento Poetry Week), set for October 26. He said there is a conference planned for later this year to coincide with the day, and as such they pared down the number of events this April.

“Last year we did 32 events in 30 days, it was nuts,” Grizzell says. “Part of what we did the last couple years was incorporate aspects of what we would generally do in a conference, but since we’re doing the actual conference this year we thought we’d back off a little from filling up April.”

Drunk Poetry and Into the Canon

For those who need a little liquid courage — or a meal — to launch into lyricism, Sacramento’s bar and restaurant scene is ready to receive you. Andru Defeye, Sacramento poet laureate emeritus, is helping organize two such events: Drunk Poetry April 19 and Into the Canon April 26. Both are fundraisers aimed at supporting October’s Sacramento Poetry Week.

“Drunk Poetry is at the Torch Club, Sunday before Sunday Sessions with the Lab Rats,” Defeye says. “It’s a whole day of entertainment. It’s a wild series of literary games we play to really bring poetry to life in a whole different way.” Tickets are available on Eventbrite on a name-your-price basis.

Meanwhile, Canon restaurant will host Into the Canon, bringing together various poets to read while attendees enjoy food prepared by the Michelin-recognized restaurant. Tickets are $30 on Eventbrite and include food.

“These are the top tier poets from Sacramento, the poets who’ve really put the city on the map,” Defeye says. “We’ve got laureates from other cities, Tama Brisbane from Stockton, Angela Drew, aka SheSpitsFire — she’s from Modesto — just a lineup of incredible poetry.”

Defeye notes that both fundraisers are an important part of being able to celebrate Sacramento Poetry Week.

“These fundraisers fund the cash prize contests and allow us to pay artists for their contributions to the curriculum we use,” Defeye says. “There’s been a cut or two to funding as far as the arts go from this administration, and we’ve definitely felt that these last few years.”

Defeye says it took a lot of love and support from the community to put together Poetry Week last year, and he and other artists wanted to use National Poetry Month to make sure people could be compensated for the work they put into the event this year.

“As those funding streams tighten up, it forces us all to really look at what’s important to us to have in our communities, and to fund and support those things,” Defeye says. “And it has created this groundswell for really authentic and organic support for the arts. People have kind of realized that if you don’t come out to shows and get behind efforts to activate the arts in the community, it may not happen.”

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