Please join the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, the Portland Museum of Art, and Maine Audubon, for a special night of poetry inspired by the exhibition David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History. A group of Black poets who live in Maine will share their poems in different locations around Maine Audubon’s Gilsland Farm Audubon Center, near Driskell’s longtime studio in Falmouth. Participating poets include Samaa Abdurraqib, Ian-Khara Ellasante, Myronn Hardy, Arisa White, and Maya Williams. Driskell found inspiration in the Maine landscape, as well as in the people and experiences of the African diaspora; these poets will share work that demonstrates how Driskell’s legacy lives on in the current moment.
This event is free and in-person.
Registration is now full. Please click on the link below to add yourself to the wait list.
Samaa Abdurraqib (she/hers) spent three years teaching Gender & Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, transitioned into the non-profit world in 2013, and currently serves as Associate Director at the Maine Humanities Council. She enjoys birding, hiking and being outdoors, and coaching leaders of color. Samaa loves Black and Brown and Queer and Trans people. She also loves her adult kitten, Stashiell Hammett, resident charmer and most adorable feline in the world. Samaa’s academic writing can be found in the collections including Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film (2017). Her creative writing has appeared in I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (2011) and The Body Is Not An Apology. Her poems can be found most recently in Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest (Littoral Press, 2020) and her chapbook Each Day Is Like an Anchor (A Clearing, 2020).
Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Winner of the 49th New Millennium Award for Poetry, Ian Khara’s poems have appeared in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, The Volta, Hinchas de Poesía, and elsewhere. With abiding affection for their hometown of Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they are an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College.
Myronn Hardy (he/him) is the author of five books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for poetry, Kingdom, and most recently, Radioactive Starlings, published by Princeton University Press (2017). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baffler, Rhino, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Bates College.
A native New Yorker, living in central Maine, Arisa White (she/hers, ma’am) is an assistant professor in English and Creative Writing at Colby College and serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. She is also an advisory board member for Gertrude and a community advisory board member for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Arisa co-authored, with Laura Atkins, Biddy Mason Speaks Up, a middle-grade biography in verse that was awarded the Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature, Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal for Multicultural Juvenile Nonfiction. Her current publications are the poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy and the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, co-edited with Miah Jeffra and Monique Mero and published by Foglifter Press.
Maya Williams (she/hers, they/them, and ey/em) is a religious queer Black Mixed Race suicide survivor constantly writing poems and was recently named the Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine. Their poems have appeared in many publications including the Maine Sunday Telegram, Frost Meadow Review, and glitterMOB. She graduated with a community practice-focused Masters in Social Work and Certificate in Applied Arts and Social Justice at the University of New England in May 2018. She is currently in Randolph College's low residency Masters in Fine Arts for Creative Writing focusing on Poetry.