We’re excited to announce the dates for the 2026 Poetry Marathon! This year will be another chance to write one poem per hour for 12 or 24 hours, with a truly international contingent of poets. As always, this will be a completely free event.

The 2026 Poetry Marathon and Half Marathon will start on June 13th. The full marathon will continue on to the 14th.

As per usual the marathon will start at 9 AM  ET (Eastern Time) on Saturday the 13th  and end at 9 AM ET on Sunday the 14th. Half marathoners can start at 9 AM ET or 9 PM ET on Saturday the 13th. We use ET as the starting time because many Marathoners are in that time zone, but please check the time at date in your own time zone before marking it on the calendar.

We will open up registration May 11th and it will close on June 8th. If you want to participate please sign up during this period. The registration form will go live on May 11th, and we’ll share a link. 

If you have any questions about the upcoming event, please send us an email. If you would like to share a prompt for the event, we encourage you to do that also via email. Prompts should be at least a sentence long. Emails should go to poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.