Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 2
Modeled after the Berkeley noontime Lunch Poems series, poets Stuart Kestenbaum (former Maine Poet Laureate and author of House of Thanksgiving) and Annaliese Jakimides (anthologized in Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest and A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis) will give a midday reading of their work. Light fare will be sold.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Devaney, Doak & Garrett.
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and the host/curator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Stuart Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and on the Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and mixed media artist who grew up in inner-city Boston and raised a family on 40+ acres on a dirt road in northern Maine, growing almost all the family’s food and pumping water by hand. She now lives beside a library in a small city. In addition to working with inner-city environmental justice organizations and international arts groups, she cofounded the Belfast Poetry Festival and has created/implemented arts and humanities programs in rural schools, prisons, recovery programs, and libraries, among others. Cited in national competitions, her poetry and prose have been published in many journals, anthologies, and magazines, and broadcast on Maine Public and NPR. Recent work appears in Maintenant 16: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, The Ekphrastic Review, and Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family. annaliesejakimides.com.