Join us for LIVING LEGACY: A Reading with the Ashley Bryan Fellows and Port Veritas at Double House Arts, hosted by Maya Williams! Living Legacy celebrates the work of diverse literary voices upholding the legacy of beloved, late Maine artist Ashley Bryan. These are the same writers selected for distinction through MWPA’s Ashley Bryan Fellowship Program. We are delighted our next reading will be hosted by Port Veritas and Maya Williams, Ashley Bryan Fellow and former Portland Poet Laureate, at Double House Arts.
Port Veritas meets every Tuesday night in person at Double House Arts Collective at 122 Spring St # 1 AND online. We typically end by 8:30 pm EST, but we have the space until 9 pm EST.
In person friends, please remain masked in the building. For More information and for the Zoom link, check out the Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1408973863913259/?rdid=XESwMD14uAoFaszL&share_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fshare%2F17tp6pYJCG%2F#
Liz Iversen’s fiction and essays explore migration, motherhood, and the history of the Philippines, where she was born. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, and Fourteen Hills, and has been supported by the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Key West Literary Seminar, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She lives with her husband and children in Maine, where she is at work on two novels.
Minquansis Sapiel pronounced (Min-Gwon-sis) is an enrolled member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe from Sipayik, one of the two Passamaquoddy reservations in Maine, a tribe that is a part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. She grew up in Sipayik overlooking the
Passamaquoody Bay. She is a published Author of a Children’s Books called “Little People of the Dawn” and “Gluskabe: and the gift of the Maple trees.” She also received her Master’s degree
in Social Work and has earned her Captains license. She is self employed as a Storyteller, Speaker, provides guided Boat tours. The Hope is to connect people to the Passamaquoddy bay
and provide people with a better understanding of Wabanaki History and Culture. In the meantime, she has collaborated with many organizations throughout Maine speaking on various topics of Wabanaki history and culture. She is a mother of three daughters and loves to take photography of the natural world.
Jinky de Rivera is a queer, non-binary, second-generation Filipinx American writer and the co-editor of the anthology Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time (Seal Press, 2006), with additional writing featured in Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally (Seal Press, 2005). Their short plays have been staged at Bindlestiff Studio, a Filipino American performing arts theater in San Francisco, and showcased in 3GirlsTheatre Company’s New Works Festival in San Francisco. They earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California, and are currently working on a genre-blending, time-traveling family drama.
Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, and she/her) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow and was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Maya has been a finalist in the New England Book Awards and Maine Literary Awards and won Garden Party Collective's chapbook contest. Ey also won the 2025 Headlight Review's chapbook contest. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts for Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry at Randolph College in June 2022. They were a finalist of the Slam Free Or Die Qualifier Slam for their National Poetry Slam 2018 team and a runner up of the Slam Free or Die Individual Slam Championship in 2018, and she was a recipient of the Maine Humanities Council's Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024. Catch Maya hosting the hybrid open mic series Port Veritas on Tuesday nights and hosting the hybrid writing workshop series at Novel Maine on Sunday mornings.
For more information on the Ashley Brain Fellowship Program, please visit this link!