Between the black volcanic stones of Pico and the shifting Atlantic light that forever rewrites the edges of the island, words will once again gather like fire around a harbor. The 14th edition of the Azores Fringe Festival revives Pedras Negras, its literary strand dedicated to books, poetry, memory, and conversation, unfolding from May 15 to 17 at the Biblioteca Auditório da Madalena.

“There were nearly a dozen proposals centered around literature,” reflects Terry Costa, artistic director of MiratecArts and founder of the Fringe. “It made perfect sense to bring this program back after it had been quietly shelved last year.”

Yet Pedras Negras has never truly belonged to shelves. It belongs to voices. To rooms where islands become language.

This year, the gathering opens in English, in conversation with American “USA Today Best-Selling Author” Christina Clancy, before returning to Portuguese waters with presentations by Maria João Martins, including her new work Natália Correia – Entre o Riso e a Paixão, a title that already carries within it the echo of the Azorean poet’s incandescent contradictions: laughter and passion, rebellion and tenderness.

For the first time, Pico will also welcome As Novas Lendas das Sete Cidades, bringing together voices from the anthology such as Carolina Cordeiro, Diana Zimbron, and Pedro Paulo Câmara. Across the weekend there will be creative writing sessions, reflections on writing for the theater, literary conversations, and the slow weaving together of ideas that only islands seem capable of sustaining — conversations where silence itself becomes part of the text.

Sunday closes not with an ending, but with the kind of nocturnal lingering the Azores know so well: writers sharing future projects and unfinished dreams before the festival drifts into Poemas Eróticos e Outras Letras da Noite at the Cella Bar, where poetry and darkness will likely remain awake long after the final applause.

For Terry Costa, however, one of the defining literary moments of this year’s program begins with a familiar collaborator. “The first proposal we received for this year’s program came from Vítor Teves,” he notes, acknowledging the longtime MiratecArts contributor whose work has steadily carved a place within contemporary Azorean letters.

Because Teves’s latest book was published by the Pico-based Companhia das Ilhas, the festival sought to give it particular prominence. On Saturday afternoon, accompanied by publisher Carlos Alberto Machado, Vítor Teves will present Conteiras – Este Caminho de Festa, inviting audiences not merely into a book, but into the long inward road that led to his ninth volume of poetry.

Teves belongs to that rare generation of Azorean artists who move fluidly between disciplines, carrying literature into other forms of seeing. A graduate in Art History from the University of Porto, with advanced studies in Literary, Cultural, and Interarts Studies, he is also a teacher and visual artist. His academic work explored the invisible crossings within the poetry of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge — an apt intellectual path for a poet whose own work often inhabits thresholds: between island and continent, celebration and solitude, permanence and disappearance.

Over the past year, Teves published both O Colecionador de Cinzentos and Conteiras – Este Caminho de Festa, further solidifying a poetic voice attentive to shadow, ritual, and the fragile architectures of memory.

And perhaps that is what the Azores Fringe continues to understand better than most festivals: that on islands, art is never merely entertainment. It is continuity. It is testimony. It is the act of gathering language before the sea carries silence too far from shore.

For those unable to stand beneath Pico Mountain during these days of literature and conversation, the festival — that restless celebration of all the arts — may still be followed through MiratecArts official website, Facebook, and social media platforms, where the islands continue their ancient habit of speaking outward into the world.

Translated and adapted from a Press Release.