Poetry in the Parks

By Danielle Badra, Fairfax County Poet Laureate 2022-24

The "Poetry in the Parks" program was created by Danielle Badra, Fairfax County Poet Laureate 2022-2024, sponsored by ArtsFairfax, and facilitated in collaboration with the Fairfax County Park Authority.

About Poetry in the Parks

Created by Danielle Badra, Fairfax County Poet Laureate 2022-2024, Poetry in the Parks featured free poetry readings and writing workshops at Fairfax County Parks. At each event, participants were invited to submit their work to a Poetry in the Parks Digital Collection.

At the project’s conclusion, ArtsFairfax unveiled new park signage by Ms. Badra with poetry and writing prompts at Ellanor C. Lawrence Park and Riverbend Park. These signs invite visitors to experience poetry inspired by the site and to contribute to a digital collection of writings and illustrations inspired by Poetry in the Parks.

Fairfax County Poet Laureate 2022-2024

Danielle Badra

“It is an absolute honor to be named Fairfax Poet Laureate. I am a passionate parks goer and outdoors enthusiast, and I derive a great deal of my poetic inspiration from nature. It is my hope to impart this same inspiration to the people of Fairfax County. Beyond just basking in the beauty of the parks, I hope that getting people outdoors and meditating on nature will motivate park-goers to also be responsible environmental stewards who will advocate for the plot of earth they occupy and keep it clean for future generations to enjoy.” – Danielle Badra

About Danielle Badra

The 2022-2024 Fairfax Poet Laureate Danielle Badra received her BA in Creative Writing from Kalamazoo College and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University.

While there, she was the poetry editor of So To Speak, a feminist literary and arts journal, and an intern for Split This Rock. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and published through the University of Arkansas Press.

It was named a semi-finalist for the Khayrallah Prize and listed in Entropy’s “Best of 2020-2021: Poetry Books & Poetry Collections.” Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is Danielle’s first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister.

Her poems have appeared in Mizna, Cincinnati Review, The Maynard, Outlook Springs, 45th Parallel, The California Journal of Poetics, Duende, The Greensboro Review, Bad Pony, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Split This Rock, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere.

In addition to teaching undergraduate composition, literature, and poetry at George Mason University, she has led writing workshops at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, OutWrite DC, and in high schools. She has been a featured reader for Split This Rock’s “Sunday Kind of Love” series, a judge for Brave New Voices in DC, and a participant in Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a festival commemorating the 2007 bombing of a historic book market in Baghdad, Iraq.