Please join Back Cove Books and MWPA as we celebrate Sarah Braunstein and her short story, “Abject Naturalism,” first published The New Yorker and featured in this year’s The Best American Short Stories, edited by Celeste Ng.

“Short stories can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values,” writes guest editor Celeste Ng. “In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” The Best American Short Stories 2025 resonates precisely at this pitch: twenty pieces that upend expectations and test the foundation of our beliefs. From a bereaved medical actress obsessed with a student in her rotation to a mysterious sickness that ignites a lethal running mania in its victims, and from the grounds of a wild animal estate to a celebrity look-alike mother-for-hire, these stories transport readers to the impossible edges of our world and vivify characters who reflect the spectrum of human experience.

Sarah will read from her work and discuss all things short stories with Taryn Bowe, MWPA’s Associate Director.

Sarah Braunstein's new novel, Bad Animals, was published by W. W. Norton in March 2024 and described by Claire Luchette in the New York Times Book Review as  "...a red-hot poker that skewers the limits of the white imagination…[A] sharp-witted, ravishing novel.” Sarah is also the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W. W. Norton), winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.

Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and in other publications. She co-wrote a play, String Theory: Three Greek Myths Woven Together, with Michael Barakiva and Amy Boyce Holtcamp.

Sarah has been the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She is associate professor of English and creative writing at Colby College.

Please join the MWPA, Gretchen Legler, and previous chapbook winners for a reading and celebration of Mike Bendzela’s Notes from Above Ground.

Award-winning nonfiction writer Chloe Cooper Jones chose Mike Bendzela’s Notes from Above Ground as the winner of the 2024 Maine Chapbook Series in nonfiction, and now the book is in print thanks to editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.

Cooper Jones writes: “From its opening lines, Notes from Above Ground captivates with an unusual, unforgettable voice—at once inquisitive and grounded. This chapbook explores mortality from unexpected angles, illuminating death not only as an end, but as a quiet, vital aspect of beauty, growth, and renewal.”

Previous chapbook winners will read from their work, as will Mike, and Gretchen Legler, author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life, will join Mike for a conversation about his winning chapbook.

Mike Bendzela lives in Standish on the historic Dow Farm estate restored by his husband. He teaches writing at the University of Southern Maine and is also the superintendent of a local cemetery. During the summer, he grows heritage apples for markets around Portland. In the past, he has worked on his husband's restoration construction crew and as an EMT in his town. He is also an American old time musician, playing fiddle and banjo. He received a Pushcart Prize for short fiction in 1992. His book of evolutionary fables, a hybrid work of fiction/prose poetry, Metazoan Variations, was published in 2020 by UnCollected Press. He is a monthly columnist for the website 3 Quarks Daily, from which the essays in this collection are drawn.

Gretchen Legler is a farmer, gardener, teacher, writer, and lover of the natural world. Her three booklength works of literary nonfiction include: All The Powerful Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, On The Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica, and Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life. Her writing has won numerous awards including the 2023 Maine Book Award for memoir, and the John Cole Award for Maine-based nonfiction. She has been awarded two Pushcart prizes, a Notable Essay mention in Best American Essays, and has been published in venues including Orion and The Georgia Review. She teaches creative writing and English at the University of Maine Farmington, where she is also the Director of the Campus and Community Garden. 

Previous Maine Chapbook Series winners include:

Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone (Poetry, 2020), Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories (Fiction, 2021), Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit (Nonfiction, 2022), Sasha Goodwin’s Centipede (Poetry, 2023), and Aliza Dube’s The Dependents (Fiction, 2024).

On the night before the Maine Crime Wave, join us for a night of suspense, betrayal, and retribution from Maine's crime writing community at Novel Bar & Café. Hosted by Matt Cost and Jule Selbo, the night will feature a criminally phenomenal line up of writers including Brenda Buchanan, Richard Cass, Bruce Robert Coffin, Paul Dorion, Mo Drammeh, Julia Spencer Flemming, Kate Flora, Chris Holm, Barbara Ross, Gabriela Stiteler, and Katie York.

Doors open at 6:30, but the event starts at 7:00! The event will take place in the Speakeasy at Novel Bar and Cafe, not in the main area.

Arrive at 6:30 to grab a drink, connect with members of the crime writing community, purchase some books from Kelly's Bookstore, and settle in for twisted tales read by masters of the craft, trivia, and prizes.

Investigate the featured writers below!

SPACE, Back Cove Books, and Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance present the book launch for The Frequency of Living Things, the new forthcoming novel by author Nick Fuller Googins. Nick will be in conversation with Taryn Bowe, Associate Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

The Frequency of Living Things is a heartbreaking American epic about three sisters who unearth lifetimes of family tensions as they are forced to rescue one of their own from peril, testing the limits of sacrifice, sisterhood, and forgiveness from the author of the “profound work of great wisdom” (Alice Elliott Dark) The Great Transition.

Josie may be the youngest sister, but she takes care of everyone. She is the left-brained scientist to her twin sisters’ right-brained artistic chaos. She makes sure their rent gets paid on time, they make their therapy appointments, and has also been their de-facto band manager since she was a teenager. When Ara, her middle sister (by a few minutes), calls from jail, it isn’t exactly a surprise, and Josie knows exactly how to snap into action.

Emma is the quintessential frontwoman, complete with looks and attitude. But the success of The Twins’ first (and only) album—gold records, Grammy nominations, and diehard fans—is two decades behind her. Hiding under the surface of her swagger is a long-held guilt that has turned her into her sister’s enabler. Emma knows she needs Ara’s creative genius and thinks a jailhouse record could be just the thing to get Ara her freedom and their band back on the main stage.

Ara is detoxing, not only from her opioid habit but also from her family. The truth is, as crazy as it sounds, she’s not in a hurry to get out of lock-up. In the most unlikely and dangerous of places, this could be her chance to face the demons of her past and disentangle herself from her family. Bertie, who raised her three daughters as a single mother, has always taught them that family won’t always be around to take care of you. A former defense attorney and perennial do-gooder, she’s committed to taking care of everyone less fortunate even if that means putting her girls’ needs second. But now Bertie must decide if she should reenter her daughters’ lives in their greatest time of need—or watch to see if the resilience she’s taught them will help carry them through.

A story both intimate and sweeping, The Frequency of Living Things explores the timeless question of how our individual destinies are intertwined with our family, our siblings, and our history no matter how we try to untangle ourselves from them.

Nick Fuller Googins has published short stories and essays in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine and works as an elementary school teacher. He is the author of The Great Transition and The Frequency of Living Things.

Taryn Bowe’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and in literary journals, such as The Sewanee Review, Epoch, Indiana Review, and Joyland. She currently serves as the associate director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Please join the MWPA and Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma for a celebration of the Write ME project!

With support from the MWPA, the Maine Arts Commission, The Telling Room, and many public libraries and organizations around Maine, and funding from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation, Julia Bouwsma created Write ME, a Maine-wide epistolary poetry project that 1) introduced the form through a series of 23 free public workshops across the state during the fall and early winter of 2024 and then 2) paired up hundreds of participating individuals as “poetry pen pals” to communicate with one another during the winter.

This project brought together people in different parts of Maine to exchange letter poems. This project was open to anyone in Maine (or connected to the state) ages 18 and up, with additional youth participation happening through The Telling Room, the Monson Arts High School Program, and assorted Maine high school teachers.

Now we’ll gather together, both virtually and in person, to celebrate the project, hear from people who exchanged poems, and celebrate the power of poetry to connect us all.

A free reception will begin at 6 PM. To watch the livestream of the event, click on the button below or go to YouTube.com and find the Waldo Theatre’s channel.

Please join the MWPA for our favorite night of the year, a community celebration of great writers and publishers from all over Maine. We will laugh, cry, and applaud excellent work from the last year. We are excited to bring the awards back to the Bangor Area for the first time since 2019. Special guests will help announce this year’s winners as we celebrate talented writers, editors, and literary professionals.

Doors open at 6 PM for a reception with snacks and a cash bar; the ceremony begins at 7 PM. Finalist books will be for sale.

The event is free, but we ask that you RSVP by clicking the orange button below. Seating is limited. If you would like to make a suggested ticket donation, we appreciate it!

To to attend online, please click the yellow button below to register for the Zoom link.

LORE is a space for the BIPOC community to connect, create, and collaborate.

In honor of the priceless and intangible legacy left to us by the beloved ancestor Ashley Bryan (left) and upheld by so many BIPOC creatives, our next LORE event will be a reading and discussion, cohosted by our partners at Mechanics Hall and featuring (clockwise from top left) , Alex (Johan Alexander), Liz Iversen, Coco McCracken and Leila Christine Nadir. These Fellows will be sharing their original writing with us and connecting with each other and with our community though conversation about their work and approaches to writing in these uncertain times.

Please note: This event is open to the public, and all who celebrate our diverse creative community are welcome and invited to attend. Doors open at 6pm.

This event is free of charge with donations accepted. However, seating is limited, and we ask that you RSVP by clicking on the button below.

For more about the Ashley Bryan Fellowship Program, please find our history and values statement.

Please join MWPA and Longfellow Books for a special event with Rosa Lane, who will be reading from her 4th poetry collection, Called Back, a sequence of poems written in theatrical monologue in queer conversation with Emily Dickinson. Called Back, a title representing the last two words Dickinson wrote, may be considered a "docudrama" of sorts in poetic form and is based on most recent research by scholars bringing the LGBTQ significance of Dickinson to light. Lane's intensive 5-year odyssey with Dickinson extended through the pandemic.

Called Back (Tupelo Press, 2024) is praised by poet Adrian Blevins as a "radical homage [to Dickinson]...that gives back the 'Feral / utterances' Lane suggests her circumstances and time in history forbade her."

For more info and/or to purchase Called Back at Longfellow, click HERE.

Rosa Lane, poet and architect, was raised in coastal Maine as the daughter of a lobsterman. She is the author of four poetry collections including Called Back (Tupelo Press, 2024), Chouteau's Chalk (U. of Georgia Press, 2019, winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize); Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016, winner of the 2017 National Indie Excellence Book Award); and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook, (published by Granite Press East with a grant from Maine Arts Commission). Lane's most recent work was named Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, winner of the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, and selected finalist for the 2023 Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Cork, Ireland) among other awards. Her work has appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Five Points, Nimrod, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, RHINO, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She lives in South Portland with her wife. Website: www.rosalane.com

Free event no RSVP.

Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry was As If a Song Could Save You (University of Wisconsin Press in fall of 2022). Her ninth collection of poetry was House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019), winner of the Four Lakes Prize. Other awards include a Maine Book Award for Poetry, The Felix Pollak Prize, the AWP Prize for Poetry, an NEA Fellowship. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. She was awarded the 2020 Distinguished Achievement Award from Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Maine in 2022. 

One way of resisting the cruelty and chaos of the current moment is to gather, process what’s happening, and identify actions we can take to protect the people and values integral to our communities.

Please join MWPA, SPACE, partners, and friends for an evening of expression, reflection, and activism, featuring short readings by writers and community leaders and information from local organizations on what you can do right now.

Featured readers:

Samaa Abdurraqib, Dania Bowie, Brandon Ying Kit Boey, Michael Colbert, Chelsea Conaboy, Samara Cole Doyon, Nick Fuller Googins, Jessi Holleran, Rylan Hynes, Abdi Nor Iftin, Reza Jalali, Jennifer Lunden, Hannah Matthews, Signature Mimi, Coco McCracken, Molly Curren Rowles, Sampson Spadafore, & Phuc Tran.

Information tables:

• ACLU of Maine

• Brazen Bandits

• EqualityMaine

• MaineTransNet

• SAFE Maine

$5 general admission/Limited free community ticket

Doors open at 6:30 PM/Readings begin at 7:00 PM.

Drinks, snacks, and community. Tears and laughter welcome!

Portland Greendrinks will hold its November gathering at Mechanics’ Hall, and MWPA is the featured nonprofit! If you don’t know Greendrinks, they note, “The goal of Greendrinks is pretty simple: good times shared among people working in, or interested in, environmental and sustainability issues. Portland Greendrinks is a project of the Maine-based non-profit, Triceratops Group, started by Elliott May in 2007/2008.”

Here is the Important  Information: ​​​​​

• Register for the event!

• 21+ Event

• Bring Your ID

• $10 with vessel

• Please leave your pups at home

• Babies are welcome as long as they are worn

• Please be kind and respectful to all of your fellow Greendrinkers!

• Be kind, respectful, and make sure to say hi to someone you don't know!

The Beverage Partners for this event include: ​

• Maine Craft Distilling

• Blue Lobster Wines

• Bissell Brothers

• Barreled Souls Brewing

• Non-alcoholic options will be available

Please join the MWPA and three previous chapbook winners, Zanne Langlois, Brandon Dudley, and Coco McCracken, for a reading and celebration of Aliza Dube’s The Dependents. Award-winning fiction writer Manuel Gonzales chose Aliza Dube’s The Dependents as the winner of the 2023 Maine Chapbook Series in fiction, and now the book is in print thanks to editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.

Gonzales writes that Dube “writes nimbly, offering the reader simple and readable yet wrenching sentences, complex characters that shift in and out of view from one story to the next, and that move us inexorably through disappointment, regret, hope, love, and time.”

Zanne Langlois chapbook Bright Glint Gone was chosen by award-winning poet Martha Collins in 2019. Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature was chosen by award-winning novelist Sigrid Nunez in 2020. Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit was chosen by award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos in 2021. Copies of all of these will be for sale.

Aliza Dube graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington with a degree in Creative Writing in 2018. After graduation, she married and became an Army wife in the Midwest. On post, she found herself in a world of fascinating characters and irreconcilable contradictions. The people she met and the places she visited would have a lasting impact on her work. She is currently a student in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing. She is the author of the memoir The Newly Tattooed’s Guide to Aftercare (2020). She strives to tell stories for people like her who grew up struggling to find characters like themselves in books.

Brandon Dudley’s chapbook Hazards of Nature: Stories was selected by National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez for the 2020 Maine Chapbook Series. Dudley is a graduate of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, where he was managing editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. His short fiction has won a Maine Literary Award and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His stories, essays, interviews and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in New South, The Millions, The Forge, Fiction Writers Review, and others. A former journalist, he now teaches high school English in Brunswick, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook Bright Glint Gone was chosen by award-winning poet Martha Collins as the winner of the 2019 Maine Chapbook Series. Her poems have appeared in The Maine Review, NAILED Magazine, Cider Press Review, The Fourth River, Off The Coast, Rattle, and on the Button Poetry channel. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Independent Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Portland and teaches high school English in Falmouth.

Coco McCracken is a Chinese-Canadian author and writer living in Portland, Maine. Her chapbook, The Rabbit, was selected by bestselling author Melissa Febos as the winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s 2021 Maine Chapbook Series. She was the recipient of a 2022 Ashley Bryan Fellowship. She was named a Lit Fest Fellow by the MWPA, in which capacity she helped organize the state’s first inaugural Maine Lit Fest. She also serves on the Community Advisory Board for the MWPA. She was accepted for a residency for the 2022 summer season at Hewnoaks, where she was additionally awarded a grant from the Maine Arts Commission to complete her first manuscript. In 2023, she was chosen to be on the jury for the Maine Literary Awards. Her work has been featured in Wirecutter’s (The New York Times) Baby + Kid Section, Maine Magazine, and Copy Mag, among others.