Please join PRINT: A Bookstore and the MWPA as we host a virtual conversation between poets W.J. Herbert and Betsy Sholl. Herbert’s debut book of poems Dear Specimen was chosen by Kwame Dawes for the National Poetry Series and is being published by Beacon Press.
To order Herbert’s book or one of Betsy Sholl’s books, please visit PRINT: A Bookstore.
To RSVP and receive the Zoom link, please click on the button below.
Chosen by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, W. J. Herbert’s debut full-length poetry manuscript, Dear Specimen, will be published by Beacon Press in October of 2021. Selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017, her work also appears, or is forthcoming, in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Boulevard, The Hudson Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Southwest Review, and others. Herbert served for seven years as coordinator of the bimonthly poetry series and annual poetry competition offered by dA Center for the Arts in Pomona, California. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio and raised in Southern California where she earned a bachelor’s in studio art and a master’s in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York and Portland, Maine.
Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Otherwise Unseeable won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry, and she also received the Maine Literary Award for Distinguished Achievement in 2020. Other awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Maine Individual Artists Grants. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland, Maine.