Please join MWPA and Longfellow Books for an online conversation with poets Deborah Cummins and Stuart Kestenbaum to celebrate the release of Cummins’ newest collection. Until They Catch Fire published by Deerbrook Editions. Of Cummins, Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser said, "Cummins is a poet with both hands in plain sight. No manipulative literary affections, no illustrations of theory, no personal mission other than to address us directly, with clarity, authenticity, and, above all, with generosity."
To RSVP for this free event and receive a link to the event on Zoom, please go here.
To order a copy of Until They Catch Fire or one of Stuart Kestenbaum’s books please visit Longfellow Books. Signed copies will be available as supplies last.
Deborah Cummins is the author of two previous poetry collections, Counting the Waves (2006) and Beyond The Reach (2002), and a collection of personal essays, Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine (2012). Her poems and essays have appeared in six anthologies and numerous literary magazines, including Orion, Fourth Genre, Yale Review, Shenandoah, and Gettysburg Review. Her poems have also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Maine Public Radio’s Poems From Here and the Maine Sunday Telegram’s weekly poetry column, Deep Water. Her numerous awards include a James Michener Fellowship, the 2013 and 2012 Maine Literary Award for Short Works in Nonfiction and a Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance 2013 Book Award Finalist. She’s also been the recipient of artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell Coloony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2007, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of five collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions), Only Now (Deerbrook Editions) and How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community. He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He is currently serving as Maine’s poet laureate and hosts Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical He was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006.