Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 11
Poets Julia Bouwsma (Maine’s 6th Poet Laureate and author of Midden), Franny Choi (author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On), and Stuart Kestenbaum (Maine’s 5th Poet Laureate and author of Things Seemed to Be Breaking) will read and share poetry in honor of writer, poet, and former MWPA Board President, Deborah Cummins.
Deborah Cummins served on MWPA’s board from 2015 until 2023, acting as Board President from 2016 until April 2023 and helping to steer MWPA through growth, a leadership transition, and Covid. We are grateful for the time, passion, and professionalism she poured into MWPA.
Free event with RSVP.
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, small-town librarian and Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2026). Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received the Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book. Other honors include the Poet’s Out Loud Prize (2016-17), the Cider Press Review Book Award (2015), and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts (Monson, ME), and Annex Arts (Castine, ME). Bouwsma’s poems and book reviews can be found in Cutthroat, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME.
Franny Choi is the author of several books, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco Books 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Their poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is currently Faculty in Literature at Bennington College and the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (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 served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.
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. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.
