Photo courtesy of Alexandria Gurley.

The fourth annual Right 2 Write festival will return on Saturday, Sept. 5 at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center and the Texas Theatre.

Right 2 Write is an annual poetry festival focused on celebrating the art form for a day filled with service, slams and workshops.

The official festival will take place Saturday, but creator and poet Alexandria Gurely, known as Alex Tha Great, said that a pre-festival event, the Hosting Slam, will take place at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center to determine the host for the poetry slam Saturday night.

“It’s a way to kind of highlight hosts who are an essential part of the poetry slam and the poetry event as well. So I thought this was kind of a clever and innovative event to come up with,” she said. “There’s going to be six different hosts that are coming from across the different areas of the cup, representing different cities to compete in this hosting slam, and so the judges are going to be judging them as far as their originality, and so things like do they come up with like a catchphrase? Do people remember them and you know their name … things of that nature.” 

Last year, Right 2 Write hosted a service project for the first time. The same collaboration is coming back by working with Volunteering while Black.

The goal last year was to pack 50 bags for the homeless population with hygiene products, a light snack and water, but they were able to beat that goal and pack 75, Gurley said.

“Our goal (this year) is to either meet that 75 goal or surpass it,” she said.

A new event this year is the Poetry Olympics, which will split people up into teams of up to five to compete through different stations.

“It’s different exercises to test their knowledge in a sense of poetry,” Gurley said. “Like literary devices being used, and then the next station, the final station they go through, each of the team members together will have to write and layer a poem together, and so it’ll be based on the amount of actual points that they get correct, and then it’ll be timed as well to determine the winner.”

The featured event for this year’s festival, the Poet Spotlight Hour, is going to feature different hosts of open mic sets or events in the Dallas area. Those include Logan Cure, host of Inner Moonlight Show at Wild Detectives and the City of Duncanville’s first Poet Laureate, Ross Cooper, host of Art OFFICIAL in Irving, Poetry Teacher, who hosts a set called Words Are Food in DeSoto, and finally LyriK Hunter, who hosts Tap The Mic at Trinity Cider and Poetic Healing at Pan African Connection.

Outside of events, a vendor fair will be at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., along with workshops.

“We usually have two workshops. One is more like writing based writing or editing, and then one is more performance-based,” Gurley said. “So talking about either techniques for the stage or for the business or artistry, and so we’ll have those two workshops happening as well.”

Tickets to this year’s events are now available via Eventbrite.

Here is the full schedule for events at R2W 2026:

Friday, Sept. 4, 2026

7 p.m.-9 p.m. Hosting Slam (Bishop Arts Theater Center)

Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026

9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m. Love Forward: A Service Project in collaboration with Volunteering while Black (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)

11 a.m.- 12 p.m. Garden, Pick Chronic, then Blaze (Quincy, Dre, & Just Blaze): Producing the Poem Workshop by Dasan Ahanu (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)

12 p.m.-1:15 p.m. Subverting the Slam Voice Workshop with Chibbi Orduna (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)

1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m. Poetry Olympics with Alex Tha Great (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)

2:45 p.m.-3:45 p.m. Haiku Battle hosted by Mr. Dave (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)

4 p.m.-5 p.m. Poets Spotlight Hour f/ Dallas Open Mic Organizers (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)

7 p.m.-10 p.m. Right 2 Write Poetry Slam hosted by the Hosting Slam Winner (Texas Theatre)

11 p.m.-1 a.m. Underground Slam hosted by Wayne Henry (Oak Cliff Cultural Center)