Please note: This event has been postponed until next week due to reports of messy commutes in the Portland area and throughout the state. If you have signed up for this event, you should receive updates via email. You can also check back in here and on social media for more details to come. We apologize for the frustration and disappointment of this last-minute decision. We just want everyone to stay safe.

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 Indigo Arts Alliance and featuring (clockwise from top left) Dania Bowie, Kendric Chua, Liz Iversen, Minquansis Sapiel, and Stacey Tran. 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.

This event is free to the public, but 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.

POSTEPONED

Please note: This event has been postponed until next week due to reports of messy commutes in the Portland area and throughout the state. If you have signed up for this event, you should receive updates via email. You can also check back in here and on social media for more details to come. We apologize for the frustration and disappointment of this last-minute decision. We just want everyone to stay safe.

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 Indigo Arts Alliance and featuring (clockwise from top left) Dania Bowie, Kendric Chua, Liz Iversen, Johan Alexander F, Minquansis Sapiel, and Stacey Tran. 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.

This event is free to the public, but 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 Print: A Bookstore, MWPA, and Mechanics’ Hall for a celebration of Maine winter through poetry.

 The poems in Mike Bove’s newest collection, EYE, were written over the course of a nor’easter that buried Southern Maine in heavy snow. Meditations on memory, grief, family, and nature, they reveal the power of icy weather to inspire reflection and exploration.

 Part poetry reading, part conversation, this event will feature Mike in poetic discussion with six acclaimed Maine poets, joining together in warm, wintry community.

Please RSVP for this free event by clicking on the button below.

Mike Bove is the author of four books of poems, most recently Soundtrack to Your Next Panic Attack (forthcoming from Aldrich Press, 2024) and EYE (Spuyten Duyvil 2023). His work has appeared in journals in the US, UK, and Canada. He was winner of the 2021 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest and a 2023 finalist for a Maine Literary Award in poetry. He is Professor of English at Southern Maine Community College and lives with his family in Portland, Maine where he was born and raised.

Samaa Abdurraqib lives in Brunswick - ancestral land of the Abenaki people. Recently, her work can be found in Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Writing the Land: Streamlines, and Cider Press Review. She was a finalist for the 2022 Maine Writers & Publisher’s Alliance Maine Chapbook Series. She is the editor of the collection From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast.

Ken Craft ‘s poems have appeared in The Writer's Almanac, Spillway, Pirene's Fountain, Pedestal Magazine, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Reincarnation & Other Stimulants (Kelsay Books, 2021).

Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks, most recently “A Pandemic Alphabet.” Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Worcester Review, Hunger Mountain, Poet Lore, and Spillway, as well as many other places. Recently, her poem, “Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown” and was read by Major Jackson. Judy won the 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).

Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently the novel-in-prose-poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021), which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry is As If a Song Could Save You (University of Wisconsin Press in fall of 2022). Her ninth collection of poetry is 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. 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.

David Stankiewicz is the author of two poetry collections: My First Beatrice (Moon Pie Press, 2013) and Night Garden (Deerbrook Editions, 2024). A graduate of the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program, David is a professor of English at Southern Maine Community College. He lives in Cape Elizabeth with his family.

Please join MWPA & Mechanics' Hall in showcasing exciting voices in Maine's rich literary legacy with six of MWPA’s Ashley Bryan Fellows. This night’s featured readers include Linda Ashe-Ford, Johan Alexander F, Liz Iverson, Coco McCracken, Leila Christine Nadir, and Minquansis Sapiel.

In honor of award-winning writer and artist Ashley Bryan’s life, the MWPA offers the Ashley Bryan Fellowships, which support emerging Maine writers who are Black, people of color, and/or members of one of the Wabanaki Nations or other Native peoples.

“I love to celebrate the artistry of people around the world in whatever material or form they work” —Ashley Bryan

For more information about the Ashley Bryan Fellowship, visit here.

Please RSVP for this free event by clicking on the button below.

Linda Ashe-Ford is a veteran in the early education field and was a classroom teacher for over 45 years. She is a past president of the Maine Association for the Education of Young Children as well as a past treasurer of the New England Association for the Education Of Young Children. Linda holds a Master’s in Education from Antioch New England Graduate School and a BA in Theater and Communications from the University of Hartford. Using her background in theater, she has written, produced and performed both original and scripted materials on various topics. Linda is a storyteller who brings the history and folktales of people of color to life. She believes that through story we can begin to deepen our understanding of each other.

Johan Alexander F has been an Ashley Bryan Fellow in 2021, and was a Maine Lit Fest Fellow in 2022. His writing has also received support from the Periplus Collective and Anaphora Arts Writing Residencies, both national organizations supporting BIPOC writers. His short stories have been published in various places, with his last three works appearing in LatineLit Journal Winter '24 (forthcoming), Eunoia Review, and the Periplus Anthology '23. Born in Medellin, Colombia, he lives in Portland, where he mentors Young Writers and Leaders at the Telling Room.

Liz Iversen was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Dakota. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, Room, and J Journal: New Writing on Justice. She has received support from Tin House and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Currently based in Portland, she is a copywriter for a radio and podcast advertising agency. You can find her online at liziversen.com.

Coco McCracken is a Chinese-Canadian author living in Portland. 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 is a 2022 Ashley Bryan Fellow and 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.

Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist and writer whose work appears in literary and scholarly journals, in museums and galleries, and in forests, classrooms, and kitchens. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Khôra, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, ASAP, and Aster(ix), and has been supported by awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the de Groot Foundation, and Aspen Words. More info: https://leilanadir.xyz/. Instagram: @afghan_vegan.

Minquansis Sapiel is a Passamaquoddy TribaI member, mother of three daughters and has a Masters in Social Work. Her daughter also illustrated the children’s book she wrote Little People of the Dawn. She grew up on the Sipayik Reservation and moved off to go to college at the University of Maine. She also has her Captain’s license and offers whale watching tours.

Please join MWPA and Mechanics Hall for a reading and conversation with award-winning poets Myronn Hardy and Betsy Sholl. Distinguished poet, writer, and journalist Tom Sleigh notes, “Myronn Hardy’s tough, analytical, associative mind moves with astonishing inventiveness between America and Algeria… Quietly visionary, Aurora Americana is among the best books of poems I’ve read in a long time.”

Copies of Hardy and Sholl’s books will be available for sale and signing.

Please RSVP for this free event by clicking on the button below.

Myronn Hardy is the author of six books of poems, including Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles award, The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy award and Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for poetry. His most recent collection is Aurora Americana, published by Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Georgia Review, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at Bates College. 

Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry is As If a Song Could Save You (University of Wisconsin Press in fall of 2022), and 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. 

Please join us in welcoming former Maine State Poet Laureate Baron Wormser back to Maine to read and talk about his two recent books, The History Hotel: Poems (CavanKerry, 2023) and a new edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid (Brandeis University Press, 2023).

Tim Seibles writes, “The History Hotel carries a mixture of quiet humor and hard-nosed insight. There’s little decoration here, no fluff to deflect our attention from what we know that we know—just the energetic presence of Wormser’s consistently cool, keen sensibility that is both bewildered and wise.”

About The Road Washes Out in Spring, the Boston Globe notes, “All in all, this is the best book about rural New England life since Jane Brox's Here and Nowhere Else. Its scope is narrow, but its reach is vast. Its short but wide-ranging essays seem like the dozens of jars of canned tomatoes Wormser and his wife put up each year to provide the base of their winter meals, each one carefully, thoughtfully, and lovingly prepared…As such, the book asks to be read slowly, savored, because, as Wormser says of the entire enterprise of living off-grid, ‘There was no sum. Only infinite entries.’”

Baron Wormser lived in Maine for over twenty-five years and worked as a librarian for SAD 59 in Madison. He is the author of 20 books including most recently The History Hotel: Poems (CavanKerry, 2023) and a new edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, (Brandeis University Press, 2023). The latter recounts his experience living with his family in Mercer, in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres 1975 to 1998. In 2000 he was appointed as the second Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King and served in that capacity for six years and visited many libraries and schools throughout Maine. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire, and continues to work in schools. Wormser lives with his wife, Janet, in Montpelier, Vermont.

Please join the MWPA and Longfellow Books at Mechanics Hall for a book launch party and signing with Tess Gerritsen. Tess will be joined by fellow New York Times best-selling author Julia Spencer Fleming to talk about The Spy Coast, Gerritsen’s highly anticipated new thriller.

#1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci writes, “The Spy Coast is a marvelously plotted read with action-packed pages, G-force twists and turns, and a platoon of fascinating characters.” Paul Doiron, author of the Mike Bowditch novels, notes, “For decades, Midcoast Maine has enjoyed a reputation as a haven for spies living in anonymous retirement. Now bestselling author Tess Gerritsen has taken this apocryphal (or not!) premise and transformed it into a crackerjack thriller. The Spy Coast is my favorite kind of page turner, rooted in relatable, if ruthless, characters, and grounded in a meticulously observed sense of place.”

Tess Gerritsen’s first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her novels have hit bestseller lists ever since. Among her titles are Gravity, The Surgeon, Vanish, The Bone Garden, and The Spy Coast. Her books have been translated into 40 languages, and more than 40 million copies have been sold around the world.

She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award and the Rita Award. Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publishers Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen” and Time Magazine named her novel The Surgeon one of the best mystery/thriller novels ever written. Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TNT television series "Rizzoli & Isles," starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander.

She is also a filmmaker. She and her son Josh produced a feature-length documentary, “Magnificent Beast,” about the ancient origins of the pig taboo. It aired on PBS channels around the country. Their previous film, “Island Zero”, was a feature-length horror movie that was released in 2018.

A former military brat, New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Julia Spencer-Fleming grew up in places as diverse as Montgomery, Rome, Stuttgart and Syracuse. A graduate of Ithaca College, George Washington University and the University of Maine School of Law, she took up writing while still a stay-at-home mother of two. During the time it took to finish her first novel, she got a full-time job at a Portland, Maine, law firm and had a third child. Julia didn’t want to write yet another lawyer-sleuth, so she used her army past and a keen eye for the goings-on at her Episcopal church to create Clare Fergusson, first female priest in the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill. The resulting series has won or been nominated for almost every American mystery award available, including the Edgar, the Anthony, and the Agatha. The 9th book in her series, Hid From Our Eyes, was published in April 2020.

Please join the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and the Portland Museum of Art for a reading and conversation about what it means for art and writing to inspire each other and to move from walls and pages to streets, trees, lightposts, and anywhere else in the world. Founded in 2005, Broadsided Press seeks to put literature and art on the streets and recently released an anthology that highlights fifteen years of their poetic and artistic collaborations. Joining poet, naturalist and Broadsided founder and editor-in-chief Elizabeth Bradfield (top left below), will be writers and artists and Broadsided contributors and collaborators including (clockwise from left) Jennifer Barber, John Bonanni, Jennifer Jean, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Jennifer Martelli, and Janice Redman. Copies of the anthology will be available for sale.

FREE PROGRAM IN THE BERNARD OSHER FOUNDATION AUDITORIUM; REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Jennifer Barber’s most recent poetry collection is The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made (Word Works, 2022). Her previous books are Works on Paper, Given Away, and Rigging the Wind. She is co-editor, with Fred Marchant and Jessica Greenbaum, of the anthology Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022). In 1992 she founded the journal Salamander and served as its editor through 2018. She is the current poet laureate of Brookline and her poems have appeared widely in journals and magazines, including Broadsided, Poetry, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Tiferet, 32 Poems, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and Orion, among others.

A Best New Poets, Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee, John Bonanni is a Cape Cod based writer who founded the Cape Cod Poetry Review. His poems have appeared in Foglifter, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, and Gulf Coast, among others. He has reviewed poetry for DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Kenyon Review. His research on poetry as an intervention for writing attitudes among learners with severe disabilities can be found in The Graduate Review (Bridgewater State University).

Elizabeth Bradfield, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Once Removed and Toward Antarctica, and has collaboratively created Theorem and the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, Kenyon Review, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry for her first book, Interpretive Work, and a Stegner Fellowship. Liz lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist, teaches at Brandeis University, and runs Broadsided Press.

Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include VOZ, The Fool, and Object Lesson. She's also released the teaching resource Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. Her poems, prose, and co-translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Rattle, The Common, On the Seawall, Terrain, the Los Angeles Review, and as an Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day.” She's been awarded fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Disquiet/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Kolkata International Poetry Festival; as well, she received an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's online writing program.

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 in 2021. His poems have appeared in he New Republic, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and he currently serves as Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens, selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and My Tarantella, also selected as a “Must Read,” awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, winner of the Small Harbor Press open reading, In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mates, and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, Scoundrel Time, Broadsided Press, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for MER.

Janice Redman is a sculptor and mother who lives in Truro. Born in England, she received her MFA from The University of Ulster, was twice a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has been the recipient of many awards including the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Prize, a Massachusetts Cultural Council award in sculpture, and residencies at Yaddo and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Her work is in the permanent collections of The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. She is represented by Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA .

Join MWPA, SPACE, Sandorf Passage, and Back Cove Books for a three-author conversation celebrating the September publication of the first U.S. edition of the internationally acclaimed book, The Last Window-Giraffe by Hungarian writer Péter Zilahy, with a new introduction by Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramović.

The American experience with war is removed—it is something that happens “over there.” But in Europe, armed conflicts have flared up across the continent for centuries, and continue on to this day. How do contemporary European authors confront this reality? How do their fictions serve as both history lessons and warnings about what the future can hold?

Translated into 22 languages, and often credited as a major text inspiring the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, The Last Window-Giraffe will finally be available to American readers. The book is a playful and political quasi-memoir about growing up in Hungary and being in Serbia during the collapse of Yugoslavia, all in the form of an illustrated children’s alphabet encyclopedia. “Window” and “Giraffe” are the words that mark the common A-to-Z in these books.

Péter Zilahy will be in conversation with Ivan Vidak, Ivan Sršen, and Buzz Poole.

Writing for The Paris Review, Marina Abramović notes, “While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.”

Please RSVP at the link below to save your (free) seat.

Péter Zilahy’s award-winning books have been adapted into theater shows, radio plays, and a wealth of other media, and inspired songs and flash mobs during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where The Last Window-Giraffe was Book of the Year. Zilahy is a versatile artist, whose work has been shown at The Kitchen in New York City, Ludwig Museum, Berliner Ensemble, Volksbühne, and The New Tretyakov Gallery, among others. He has performed on Broadway, lectured all over the world, was a Kluge Fellow at The Library of Congress, and a fellow of Akademie Solitude, handpicked by Nobel laureate Herta Müller. Zilahy joined Anthony Bourdain in Budapest for an episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown.

Ivan Vidak is the author of the novel Radio Siga and the short story collection Ugljik na suncu (Carbon in the Sun). Radio Siga was praised by Publishers Weekly and Words Without Borders, and was the June 2022 Official Du Mois Selection. Vidak lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

Ivan Sršen is an editor, translator, and writer. In 2007, he started the Zagreb-based independent publisher Sandorf. He is the author of the novel Harmattan and edited the anthology Zagreb Noir. He has translated a wide range of authors from English to Croatian, including Frank Zappa, Henry Rollins, and Robert Graves. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia.

Sandorf Passage is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publisher cofounded by Buzz Poole in South Portland that publishes work that creates a prismatic perspective on what it means to live in a globalized world. It is a home to writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.

Please join us with our friends at Longfellow Books in celebrating the launch of Sasha Goodwin’s Centipede, the latest winner of the Maine Chapbook Series. Eduardo Corral calls Goodwin’s language “memorable and muscular” and her imagination “dazzling.” In choosing this chapbook as the winner, Joshua Bennett writes that it “asks us to expand our vision, re-orient our looking.”

Goodwin will be joined by two recent Maine Chapbook Series winners, Suzanne Langlois and Brandon Dudley, for reading and conversation. All of the recent Maine Chapbook Series editions will be available for sale.

At the beginning of the pandemic Sasha Goodwin moved back to Maine after thirty mostly good years in Seattle. She grew up in Pownal and lives in Auburn, with two black cats and a young pit mix named, Cheddar. In 2017 she completed an MFA in Creative Writing through the Pacific University low-residency program in Oregon.

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.

Please join the MWPA, the Maine Arts Commission, and Maine State Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma in an online celebration of a pilot version of the Write ME epistolary writing project. During the summer of 2023, hundreds of people across Maine and beyond—most of them complete strangers—wrote each other letter poems. This event will highlight some of those exchanges and celebrate the ways that poetry can bring us together across all kinds of distance and difference.

Anyone is welcome to join us. Please RSVP to receive a link to the event on Zoom by clicking on the button below.

Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.

Lily King is the award-winning author of five novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, was published on March 3rd, 2020, and her first collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter, was released on November 9, 2021. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.

Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school teacher living in Portland, Maine. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, The Masters Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. Here in the Night is her first book.

Taryn Bowe’s recent work has appeared in Epoch, The Sewanee Review, Indiana Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Joyland and is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories 2023. She serves as the Associate Director at the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Jeri Theriault, a Franco-American poet, grew up in Waterville, Maine and graduated from Colby College, later earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry collections include Radost, my red and In the Museum of Surrender. She is the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. Her poems and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Plume. Recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Jeri lives in South Portland.  You can read more about her work at https://www.jeritheriault.com.

Philip Carlsen has received many commissions and awards for his compositional work, including performances at New York’s Town Hall and the Kennedy Center. Retired in 2015 from the University of Maine at Farmington, he currently plays cello in the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra, the Buttonwood Piano Trio, and the early music group St. Mary Schola, as well as in more experimental ventures with Carl Dimow and others.

Flutist and guitarist Carl Dimow is an eclectic musician whose performances include jazz, klezmer, Brazilian choro, and a wide variety of improvised music. Current projects include the Carl Dimow Jazz Quartet, the Casco Bay Tummlers klezmer band, Choro Louco and various special projects such as this one. More at carldimow.com.

A native Mainer, Larissa Vigue Picard has been Executive Director of Pejepscot History Center since 2015. She has served on statewide and local boards, and is a volunteer in the school system. Formerly, she was Director of Education at Maine Historical Society in Portland. For about half of the 15 years she spent in Vermont, Larissa was Director of Community Programs at Vermont Humanities Council. She also taught in the community college system and worked as a freelance writer. She holds degrees in English Literature from Bates and Middlebury Colleges.

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

Our next LORE event will be a community reading, hosted by our partners at Port Veritas and The Equality Community Center, featuring 2021 Ashley Bryan Fellow Coco McCracken and 2022 Ashley Bryan Fellows Maya Williams and Ian-Khara Ellasante. These gifted writers will be sharing offerings from their respective crafts of memoir and poetry. Please note: This event is open to the public and may be attended virtually OR in person, and all who celebrate our diverse creative community are welcome and invited to attend.

Time: 8 pm

Date: Tuesday, June 27

Location: Equality Community Center [15 Casco St, Portland] AND online at https://us04web.zoom.us/j/893705103

Questions about this event and other LORE happenings can be addressed to Samara Cole Doyon at samara@mainewriters.org.

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

Please join MWPA and PRINT: A Bookstore for a special event at Mechanics' Hall featuring Maya Williams and their debut collection, Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023). Maya will be joined by the poets Ian-Khara Ellasante, Katya Zinn, and Catherine Weiss for a reading and conversation.

Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet and host of Poetry Unbound, writes, “In dexterous form, through multiple voices, registers and allusions, Maya Williams asserts a vibrant poetry that has, at its core, understood itself, and asks to be understood.”

This is a free event, and we ask that you please RSVP and save your seat by clicking on the orange button.

If you would like to tune into this event on Zoom, please click on the registration button below. Please note that we cannot promise perfect video and sound quality, but hopefully it will be good enough to experience the event.

Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently the seventh poet laureate of Portland. May 2023 marks the release of their debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, via Game Over Books. October 2023 marks the release of their second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, via Harbor Editions. They were one of three artists of color selected to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center's Arts Across America series in 2020 and were listed as one of The Advocate's Champions of Pride in 2022. She is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow through the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. You can follow more of eir work at mayawilliamspoet.com

Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary parent, partner, poet, and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara’s poetry has been published in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Pipe Wrench, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta, Writing the Land: Maine, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Ian-Khara is a VONA alum whose awards and honors include the 2023 Cave Canem Fellowship, the New Millennium Award for Poetry, the Ashley Bryan Fellowship, and the Point Foundation Scholarship. Their critical writing, including the essay “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?,” has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Families in Society. Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they teach Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana at Bates College.

Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist from Deer Isle. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, perhappened, Birdcoat, Bodega, Counterclock, petrichor, HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Flypaper Lit. Catherine is the artist behind the collaborative poetry chapbook/card deck I WISH I WASN’T ROYALTY (Game Over Books, 2020). They are also the author of chapbook-length poem FERVOR (Ginger Bug Press, 2021), full-length poetry collections WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS (Game Over Books, 2021), and GRIEFCAKE (Game Over Books, 2023). More at catherineweiss.com.

Katya Zinn is a Boston-based, LA-born-and-raised performance poet, educator, and activist. Their first chapbook-length collection human verses was released in 2021. When not shouting poems to mostly-strangers at local dives, she works as a teaching artist and equity director of a children’s education nonprofit, where she’s working on starting a scholarship program to provide free therapeutic mentorship in the arts to neurodivergent children from low-income backgrounds. Zinn is currently the self-appointed poet laureate of Chuck E. Cheese, but hopes to make the title official (as soon as she can get Charles to respond to one of her tweets). Manic-depressive Pixie Dream Girl is their first full-length collection, for which she spent last summer on a national release tour. Find Katya on most social media under @zinnvisibleink, or by performing a simple conjuring spell at the next full moon.

“One of the essential voices in American poetry” (New York Times), the legendary poet, author and art journalist Eileen Myles makes their SPACE debut on the release of a new book, a “Working Life,” their first collection of poems since 2018.

Reading/performance followed by discussion and audience Q&A. Co-presented by SPACE Gallery, Back Cove Books and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of ’22. Their newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, is out now. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

Eileen Myles in their own words:

What is the poetry equivalent of sitting on a chair like a musician with just a guitar, or a comedian on a stool on the cover of an album not even standup, but just going to tell it to you right here on vinyl. For me, a “Working Life” is not so much unplugged as openly admitting that the poems here, the love poems and the waiting poems and the reveling in stark slowed down time is the essence of poetry as much as it was in my 20s as it is in in my 70s, like a grand contractual permission to be and the poems are the plan. a “Working Life” is a book in which I throw my cards down, meaning the poems pretty much model the existence that is unfolding in all of them and these little formulas, short and long in which the plan gets revealed again and again was always to live exactly like this, and just once, now. I’m hoping the reader picks it up and feels it’s true.

Praise for a “Working Life”:

“It is important to stay happy, to maintain daily reminders of goodness and wonder, and in a ‘Working Life’, Eileen Myles helps us do just that. With their streamlined style and singular devotion to mundane wonder, they show how life can still be surprising despite the inevitability we may feel each day. Contradictions and coincidences, joy and despair, the intricacies of life and death are all captured in these brief, fleeting poems, told in tight verse and with some lines only a word long. They reflect how quickly time goes by and how each second provides something deep and new, creating an infinite loop of meaning—a message that is helpful and frustrating, uplifting and perplexing. Really, it’s life.”—BookPage

Praise for Eileen Myles:

“Myles’s poems set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match . . . Now Myles is older than [Robert] Lowell when he died, and enjoying [their] greatest moment of accomplishment and fame. [Myles’s] very presence in the world is a form of activism, but [their] work, when studied with care, is also political in the sense that it gives evidence of one of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you’re likely to find.”—Dan Chiasson, New York Review of Books 

“Choreography’s calligraphic touch: Bill T. Jones, Jackson Pollock, Eileen Myles. [Myles] moves so generously, stays so lightly, has so openly found and crafted life, as ceremony, every day, it’s as if [their] hands and feet trail sonic pigment, chromatic grammar, so that the earth is constantly refreshed by the poems as [they] step and caress, with ear’s utmost care, as curate of our common experiment, our undercommon experience.”—Fred Moten

“In Eileen Myles’s newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles’s new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet’s previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America, and its politics . . . The form of Myles’s work rivals its subject matter in intimacy. The lines in Evolution are physical, a body unleashed but not yet comfortable and not without fear. The short lines rush down the page, movement as touch, touch as freedom.”—Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review

Please join MWPA and Longfellow Books for a special book launch at Mechanics' Hall featuring Jennifer Lunden, author of AMERICAN BREAKDOWN: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life.

Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, will be in conversation with Lunden about her long-awaited debut.

When Jennifer Lunden became chronically ill shortly after moving from Canada to Maine, her case was a medical mystery. Just 21, unable to hold a book or stand for a shower, she lost her job and consigned herself to her bed. The doctor she went to for help told her she was “just depressed.” This wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves Lunden's quest to understand the source of her own enigmatic illness with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.

Kirkus Reviews notes, “Blending theory and memoir, the author personifies her struggle for wellness and its associated costs and consequences. An alarming chronicle of catastrophic chronic illness and a passionate plea for health care reform.”

This book launch is happening a day before the official release, which means guests will be able to gain access to the book a day before anyone else. This is a free event, and we ask that you please RSVP and save your seat by clicking on the orange button.

For the protection of the author and others with pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable to long Covid or death, this will be a masked event. (But masks may be removed to eat and drink.) So that people with chemical sensitivities may safely attend, please refrain from wearing perfumes, colognes, or other scented products.

Jennifer Lunden is a published author, poet, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), and former therapist. She is the recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction. Lunden, a dual citizen, has also been awarded two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and one from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, Hewnoaks, and the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France.

Chelsea Conaboy is a health and science journalist. Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood is her first book. She lives in a 1920s bungalow near the ocean in Maine, where she gardens poorly and serves as a board member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

Join us for the Darcy Scott Award Fundraiser featuring a reading and signing by the award-winning Bruce Robert Coffin, author of the bestselling Detective Byron mystery series, at Longfellow Books on Friday, May 5th, at 5:30 p.m.

The Darcy Scott Award is given in memory of Darcy Scott, author of the Island Mystery series, part of the book sales proceeds will be used to support the Darcy Scott Award for Young Mystery Writers. This award provides one young writer with a full scholarship to attend the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Maine Crime Wave and a travel/hotel stipend to stay in Portland. A $10 donation is suggested.

Open to the public, and refreshments will be provided. For more information, visit www.maineauthorspublishing.com/darcyscottaward

To be eligible for The Darcy Scott Award all applicants must:

• live in Maine at least 6 months a year

• and be under the age of 40 at the time of application.

Note: There is no limitation on what the award recipient has previously published, or if they have not published any work yet.

Bruce Coffin Bruce Robert Coffin is the award-winning author of the Detective Byron mystery series and former detective sergeant with more than twenty-seven years in law enforcement. At the time of his retirement, from the Portland, Maine police department, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine’s largest city. Following the terror attacks of September 11th, Bruce spent four years working counter-terrorism with the FBI, earning the Director’s Award, the highest honor a non-agent can receive.

Winner of Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Awards for Best Procedural and Best Investigator, and the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction Novel, Bruce was also a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel.

Bruce’s short fiction appears in many anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2016.

He is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He is a regular blog contributor to Murder Books blog.

He lives and writes in Maine.

Award-winning author Darcy Scott (Best Mystery, 2013 Indie Book Awards; Silver Award, 2013 Readers Favorite Book Awards; Bronze Award, 2013 IPPY Awards; Winner, 2019 National Indie Excellence Award) was a live-aboard sailor and experienced ocean cruiser who’s sailed to Grenada and back on a whim, island-hopped through the Caribbean, and was struck by lightning in the middle of the Gulf Stream. For all her wandering, her summer home and favorite cruising grounds remained along the coast of Maine—the history and rugged beauty of its sparsely populated out-islands serving as inspiration for much of her fiction, including Margel’s Madness and her popular Island Mystery Series (Matinicus, Reese’s Leap, and Ragged Island). Her debut novel, Hunter Huntress, was published in 2010 by Snowbooks, Ltd., UK.

In this chapbook, nine luminous, Maine-based queer and trans writers present essays, stories, and poems that queer friendship. Here you’ll find revelations of relationships, of the self with others, adolescent selves, self-love, survival, and the way we have been saved, strained, by our friends: the ocean, a cat, a girl, a cousin, a stranger. These are gorgeous pieces of writing about loss, about being found, about longing.

Every March, thousands of writers, editors, and publishers flock to the annual AWP Conference to talk shop, trade book recommendations, and unwind with friends and drinks.

This year Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA) is throwing its own March shindig at SPACE Gallery. The Alternative Writers’ Party will feature flash readings from 5 debut authors with books out in 2023 and will include plenty of time to mix, mingle, and laugh with new and old friends.

Debut authors include:

• Brandon Ying Kit Boey, author of KARMA OF THE SUN

• Nick Fuller Googins, author THE GREAT TRANSITION

• Jennifer Lunden, author of AMERICAN BREAKDOWN

• Rebecca Turkewitz, author of HERE IN THE NIGHT

• Maya Williams, author of JUDAS & SUICIDE

 Attendees who haven’t preregistered may register at the door.

Doors open at 7:00 pm. Readings start at 7:20 pm.

If you are a Maine author with a 2023 debut and would like to attend Alternative Writers’ Party Portland as an honorary guest, please email Taryn Bowe at taryn@mainewriters.org. We would love to celebrate you too!