Please join the MWPA and SPACE and a group of writers in celebration of Kristen Case’s new book, Daphne.
In celebration of Kristen Case’s new book, Daphne, recently published by Tupelo Press, a group of 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 Kristen Case, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Nina MacLaughlin, Jefferson Navicky, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), a Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021) won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Jefferson serves the New England poetry community in a variety of capacities including as a member of the steering committee for the Belfast Poetry Festival, as Interviews Editor for The Café Review, as Prose Poetry Editor for Hole in the Head Review, and as a member of the board of Millay House Rockland. He has taught writing as a long-time adjunct faculty member at Southern Maine Community College, as a visiting professor at Bates College, and many times through 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.
