A group of students studying poetry

The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center

Founded in 1997, The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College has a core mission to bring poets of national and international stature to campus to inspire students and the Smith community. All events are free and open to the public. See the News, Events & Community page to keep up-to-date on our current season and announcements.

Explore the Poetry Center

Blackout Poetry Project

This community project offers a chance to interact with and reinterpret T.S. Eliot’s collected works. Participants will engage with his iconic works, and his visions of a world in political and ecological turmoil using new media and visual expression to say something entirely new. After each stunning, idiosyncratic, vibrant, haunting, or hilarious page is made, we will gather them into a new collection of poetry and art that could only have been made by our community.

Learn More

Current Season Poets

Nine Syllables Press

About the Press

Nine Syllables Press is a chapbook press created by Adrie Rose (AC ‘22) in partnership with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. We seek to address ongoing inequity by providing a new platform for systematically excluded voices, including but not limited to women, BIPOC, and trans/LGBTQIA++ poets. 9SP is currently the only press at a historic women’s college in the US.

Smith students are intimately involved in every part of the press, learning about all aspects of the editorial process and the publishing industry along the way.

Chapbook Contest

Each fall, students in The Chapbook in Practice: Publishing read the manuscripts submitted to our annual contest, learn about the publishing industry, and narrow down the manuscripts to a top ten. Those top ten get sent on to our final judge, who selects the winner.

Each spring, students enrolled in The Chapbook in Practice: Design study book design and production. Each student creates an interior design and cover design for the winning chapbook. In spring ‘23, Amelia Burton designed the cover for our first printed volume, an anthology of women poets writing about the body.

We received almost 300 submissions our first year, and final judge Leila Chatti selected

 Desire/Halves by Jai Hamid Bashir as the 2023 winner. Chatti describes Desire/Halves as “a lush read of infinite tenderness.” The cover for Desire/Halves was designed by Margaret Valle ‘26.

Shaping the Future of Poetry

After studying the gender statistics on major literary prizes—and discovering that, in general, they still overwhelmingly favor men—Adrie Rose AC ’22 set out to make some change. With an eye toward poetry and chapbooks, Rose worked with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center to found Nine Syllables Press, igniting interest across campus and the region.

Read the Article Learn More About the Press

“The Poem I Wish I Had Read” Series

We’re excited to announce the launch of “The Poem I Wish I Had Read,” a video series in which acclaimed poets discuss and read a single poem that they wish they had encountered as a teenager. In each of these video testimonials, poets talk about who they were as high school students, why reading these poems would have been transformational for them, and how these works altered their sense of what a poem can be. Enjoy the following featured videos, and check out the full series on our YouTube channel.—Matt Donovan

Broadsides

The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center offers a series of fine letterpress broadsides signed by the poets and designed and illustrated by Barry Moser, printer to the college.

BROADSIDES GALLERY

Image of framed poetry broadsides

Contact The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center

Wright Hall 102
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

Phone: 413-585-4891 Email: poetryct@smith.edu

Director: Matt Donovan 
Program and Outreach Coordinator: 
Jennifer Blackburn 
Editor, Nine Syllables Press
Adrie Rose
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