By Multicultural Press Contributor
In an age where headlines burn with war, hatred, and the persistent fractures of humanity, there remains a place where words gather not to wound but to heal. That place is Medellín, Colombia — once synonymous with violence and fear, today reclaimed by poetry as a stronghold of peace, multicultural unity, and spiritual resilience.
From July 5 to 12, the city will again transform into a living poem, hosting the 35th International Poetry Festival of Medellín. Founded in 1991, in the aftermath of Medellín’s darkest years, the festival rose from bloodstained streets to declare that the language of compassion can defy the language of death. It was a radical dream in a city that, at the time, was seen as a synonym for narco-terror, car bombs, and unstoppable grief. But poetry, as the festival’s founders understood, has always been a rebellion — against silence, against erasure, against despair.
This year, under the powerful theme “Life will emerge liberated from iron,” the festival will welcome poets from around the world, voices who arrive carrying the scars and triumphs of their cultures. Murad Al-Sudani, a Palestinian poet whose verses remember children’s shawls covered in war’s daffodils, and Safia ElHillo, the Sudanese poet chronicling a grandmother fleeing with gold and books into the wasteland, remind us that poetry is a universal language of survival. Their words cross borders that bombs and bullets cannot.
A City Reborn Through Verse: For 35 years, Medellín’s poetry festival has been a transformative force, extending its embrace to every barrio, every hill, every scarred heart of the city. Fernando Rendón, the festival’s director and one of its original founders, recalls how Medellín in the 1990s was paralyzed by terror — 45,000 dead in a single decade, a city reduced to silence by fear. And yet, as he explains, “we believed poetry could oppose terror.” The festival’s strategy has been audacious: do not hide poetry in ivory towers, but pour it into the streets. Over these decades, the festival has reached 120 neighbourhoods, held more than 2,000 workshops, and built cultural exchanges that span 196 countries. Poets have read in theatres, in parks, in classrooms, and in public squares, making verse as natural a part of civic life as breathing. Through these efforts, the festival became a vital artery for what Rendón calls justice poetic: a stand against fascism, against nihilism, against the mass production of hopelessness. It is a mission that resonates far beyond Medellín. In partnership with the World Poetry Movement, born in 2011, the festival has helped coordinate poetic actions in more than 100 countries, supporting peace campaigns, ecological defense, migrant solidarity, and global movements for human dignity.
Poetry Versus the Machine: In an era when social networks and ephemeral messages threaten to flatten language itself, the Medellín Poetry Festival resists that flattening with patient, living words. Over the years, it has built one of the largest audiovisual anthologies of poetry on the planet, preserving more than 1,400 recorded readings and interviews on its Prometeo YouTube channel. At the same time, its associated magazine Prometeo has published 123 issues, creating a multilingual, multicultural mirror of the world’s poetic pulse. This is not merely nostalgia for old-fashioned lyricism. Rather, the festival proposes that poetry is essential for human survival, no less vital than food or water. Poetry names wounds but also dreams of their healing. It shows that there is a different path than revenge and hate. Rendón puts it bluntly: “Without poetry there is no hope, no future. Poetry is the message opposed to slaughter.”
A Multicultural Embrace: Each July, Medellín becomes a crossroads of accents, rhythms, metaphors. From the eagle’s nests of Cerro Picacho to the ancestral trails of Sugar Bread Hill, the city resonates with syllables in Arabic, French, Quechua, Portuguese, Swahili, Korean, Dari, Spanish, and countless other tongues. The festival reminds us that difference is not a threat but a gift: each language offers a way to say peace with a slightly different music, and that music is richer together. This year, the guest voices will stand in solidarity with Gaza, with Sudan, with the Amazon, with all the threatened places on Earth. They will sing the possibility of a world where, as poet Maríamatilde Rodríguez writes,
“I am the air that shakes the oak leaves next to your window
the absent voice that sows seeds in the snail of your ear
the infallible god of nostalgia…”
It is a song that does not deny pain but insists on rebirth, like orchids blooming from forgotten logs.
Medellín and Its Citizens: A Festival Made by All: Perhaps the most remarkable success of the Medellín Poetry Festival is how deeply its spirit has entered the hearts of the city’s people. The festival is no longer simply an event; it is part of Medellín’s cultural DNA. Citizens, young, old, urban, rural, have grown up listening to verses in parks, participating in workshops, filling public plazas to overflowing at the opening and closing ceremonies. Poetry, once seen as distant or elitist, has become a shared heritage. Ask any participant, and they will tell you the festival changed their view of language, of art, of what community can mean. They will tell you that a city can heal when it allows its wounds to speak, and listens. In that sense, Medellín is a pioneer not just for Colombia but for the world, proving that even a place crushed by violence can reimagine itself through the mysterious, courageous, multicultural power of poetry.
With great expectations for the days ahead: As the 35th edition unfolds, the world again teeters between peace and war. Colombia, too, still wrestles with conflict. But poetry’s voice is steady. Its principles remain unwavering: to resist fascism, to challenge fatalism, to oppose the logic of permanent conflict. This year’s programming will feature workshops on ecological justice, celebrations of Indigenous voices, tributes to anti-colonial struggles, and a reaffirmation of poetry’s duty to defend life in all its forms. In the words of festival founder Fernando Rendón, “The world must choose: life or death, peace or war, poetry or massacre.” Medellín’s festival, shining in its 35th year, dares to choose life — and dares to invite every culture, every person, to dance in that choice. From the hills of Aburrá to the farthest corners of the earth, let the winged words fly.
