Please join the MWPA and SPACE and six writers in celebration of Kristen Case’s new book, Daphne.

In celebration of Kristen Case’s new book, Daphne, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in June,  six accomplished and award-winning poets and writers will gather to share work and talk about how their work is in conversation with various poems and traditions and what that means. The poets & writers include Samaa Abdurraqib, Kristen Case, Kate Colby, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Nina MacLaughlin, and Jeffrey Thomson.

In Daphne, Case writes, “The story goes like this: a girl/woman is chased after and lost. She becomes a lost thing. The man becomes a poet.”

The editors of Tupelo Press call Daphne “a powerful decolonization of the imagination” and note that in the book she “explores the relationship between predation and the lyric, particularly within the Western canon…[S]he does not merely critique or gesture at problems, but instead, works toward more just and equitable forms of discourse. By challenging the boundaries between literary criticism, prose poetry, hybrid forms, manifesto, and the lyric, Case ultimately works within received literary forms to expand what is possible within them.”

Please join us for what will be a one-of-a-kind reading and conversation. PRINT: A Bookstore will be on hand to sell copies of Kristen Case’s book and books by the others. Tickets are $5 with some free community tickets available at the button below.

Samaa Abdurraqib is the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (2023). Recently, her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, december, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and in the edited collection Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (2022). Her newest chapbook, Towards a Retreat will be published by Diode Editions in 2025. Samaa is a certified Maine Master Naturalist and she is always listening for birdsong. 

Kristen Case’s latest poetry collection, Daphne, will be published by Tupelo Press in June. Her first, Little Arias was published by New Issues Press in 2015, and her second collection, Principles of Economics, published by Switchback Books, won the 2018 Gatewood Prize. She is the recipient of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry (2016 and 2020), a MacDowell Fellowship, and the UMF Trustee Professorship. She is Executive Director of the Monson Arts Seminar, and she is also the author of the book American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (in development, Oxford UP), William James and Literary Studies (forthcoming, Cambridge UP), Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Uses and Abuses of An American Icon (Fink, 2021), 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive (Milkweed Editions, 2019), and Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge UP, 2016). Her current book project is Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions). She is Scholarship Research and Grants Manager at the Mitchell Institute.

Kate Colby’s books of poetry include I Mean and Reverse Engineer. Paradoxx is forthcoming from Essay Press in September. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Harper’s, Lana Turner, LitHub and The Nation. Colby was a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts, where she now serves on the advisory board. She grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown and UPenn, and performs with the ad hoc poets’ theater group, Spatulate Church Emergency Shift.

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice (Black Sparrow), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and was also a books columnist for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist won the Vassar Miller Prize, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press. His poems have appeared recently in magazines including Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and he received the 2025 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine and Maggie Smith. He has helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of multiple books including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory (Alice James, 2022) and Half/Life: New and Selected Poems (Alice James, 2019), his memoir, fragile, The Complete Poems of Catullus: an Annotated Translation, and an anthology, From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.  He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

Please join us for MWPA’s beloved GATHER event series! On Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 6:00 PM, MWPA members & friends can attend an in-person Gather at one of several locations around the state as the online Poetry Gather is taking a break for the month of July.

To join an event, find the most convenient location below, and gather with us!

Please note: A couple of our regular Gather locations will not be meeting this month, and some new Gathers have begun or recently rejoined the mix. Please check the details below very closely. You can reach out to your local Gather host for questions and concerns surrounding illness protocols and precautions, and we encourage you to join an online Gather if in-person events become unsafe or inaccessible for you. For more information, contact Samara at: samara@mainewriters.org.

About GATHER: GATHER encourages members (and their friends!) to meet and mingle with fellow members in locations around Maine for camaraderie and conversation. There is no agenda to GATHER besides getting together with your community of fellow writers and literary professionals to talk writing, reading, and life.

While GATHER events are not open readings, manuscript exchanges, or organized writing-prompt sessions, they are opportunities for literary-minded folks to meet and plan any of those things and more. Food and drink is most always available for purchase.

In-Person Events:

BANGOR
Host: Annaliese Jakimides (a.jakimides@gmail.com)
Location: Sea Dog Brewing (26 Front St, Bangor)

BELFAST
Host: Beckie Weinheimer (beckieweinheimer@gmail.com)
Location: TBD (will be updated by July 7)

BLUE HILL
Host: Marie Epply & Sarah Pebworth (mmepply@yahoo.com, sapebworth@gmail.com)
Location: Marlintini's Grill (83 Mines Rd, Blue Hill)

SOUTH PORTLAND
Host: Jeanne Julian (jmcjulian@yahoo.com)
Location: Bridgeway Restaurant (71 Ocean St., South Portland)