About the campaign

In the spring of 2022, two poets and a poet-artist connected around the idea of bringing poets and artists together in creative collaboration for the cause of alleviating hunger.

The result was a 2-week Online Art Auction to Alleviate Hunger, with bidding kicked off on December 3rd, 2022.

Artists from The Poartry Project selected a poem about physical hunger by a Poetry X Hunger poet and created original “ekphrastic art” in response to the poem to be auctioned. The artists generously donated 100% of the proceeds from sales of their art to Feed the Children.

We selected Feed the Children because its extensive national and international presence aligns with our artists coming from Maryland, Vermont, Illinois, New Mexico and Australia and our poets hailing from Canada, Honduras, Ireland, Zimbabwe, India, Maryland, Vermont and New Mexico.

The auction kicked off on December 3rd with an online opening reception with the artists and poets and continued to run through December 17th. As a bonus for opening bidders and reception attendees, the pairings of available artists and poets were present at the reception to read their poems, share the stories of artistic responses and their creative processes. We also had guest speakers sharing their hunger-related music, performance poetry and international aid observations throughout the reception.

The Art

All artwork copyright of the artist. ARTISTS: Barbara Ezell, Doze Butler, Elaine Weiner-Reed, Elle Dooley, Heather Swick, JC Wayne, Randy Weber, Skyler Dacugon

The Poems

that inspired the art