Join us post-Lit Fest programming for an evening of fun and interactive literary-themed events around the city. There will be games! There will be friendly competition! There will be poetry! There will be hilarity! There will be food and beverages galore! Join us on the crawl!

This event is free with the option to purchase food and drink at some locations.

Marpheen Chann is a thinker, writer, advocate, and speaker on social justice, equity, and inclusion.

As a gay, first-generation Asian American born in California to a Cambodian refugee family and later adopted by an evangelical, white working-class family in Maine, Marpheen uses a mix of humor and storytelling to help people view topics such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through an intersectional lens.

Marpheen is the author of a memoir titled “Moon in Full” coming out June 2022 from Islandport Press.

Marpheen Chann has a strong commitment to public service and serves as:

• At-Large Charter Commissioner, City of Portland, Maine (Elected)

• President, Cambodian Community Association of Maine

• Member, Maine Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

• Member, Planning Board for the City of Portland, Maine

• Board Member, Equality Community Center in Portland, Maine

Marpheen Chann lives in Portland, Maine. He works in the nonprofit and advocacy sector and holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Southern Maine and a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law.

Richard Russo knows small-town America. This masterful novelist has an uncanny sense of the way life works in the gritty industrial towns of the American Northeast. From the gossip and the resentments to the people and the cafes, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Richard Russo chronicles blue-collar America in ways constantly surprising and utterly revealing.

Russo is the author of eight novels, including Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of short stories; and a memoir, Elsewhere. His 2001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was also adapted into an HBO miniseries, starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt. Russo’s latest work is Chances Are…, a humorous and riveting story about the complex power of friendship.

Russo earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s in fine arts, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. In 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association and in 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in Portland, Maine.

Maine Lit Fest - Day 9

According to the most recent U.S. Census Poverty Data, more than 10 million children—nearly 1 in 7—live in poverty. An even larger share of children—1 in 6—worry about where and if they’ll get their next meal. For many children whose families are experiencing financial hardships, hunger, housing insecurity, and limited access to health care and childcare provide an uncertain backdrop against which all other interactions and relationships play out.

This panel will feature YA and Middle Grade authors whose work explores economic challenges from the perspectives of adolescents and youth. What can be gleaned about our society, institutions, and families from a young person’s eye? How can stories and novels for young people featuring characters with diverse economic circumstances expand empathy as well as provide, as Rudine Sims Bishop describes, “windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors” for many young readers? 

Featured authors include Rob Costello (anthologized in Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small Town America), Gillian French (Sugaring Off and Grit), George Jreije (Shad Hadid and The Alchemists of Alexandria), Jo Knowles (Ear Worm and Where the Heart Is), and Maria Padian (How to Break a Heart and Wrecked). Jennifer Richards Jacobson (Paper Things and The Dollar Kids) will facilitate.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.

Rob Costello (he/him) is a queer man who writes contemporary and dark speculative fiction with a queer bent for and about young people. His work has appeared in The Dark, The No Sleep Podcast, Hunger Mountain, Stone Canoe, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Narrative, and Rural Voices:15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America.

He holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is an alumnus of Millay Arts. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and has served on the faculty of the Whole Novel Workshop at the Highlights Foundation since 2014. He lives and works in Ithaca, NY with his husband and their dogs. Find out more at www.cloudbusterpress.com or on Twitter @CloudbusterRob.

Gillian French‘s debut novel, Grit (HarperTeen), was an Indie Next List pick, a Junior Library Guild Selection, received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and ALA Booklist, was an Edgar Award Finalist, a South Carolina Young Adult Book Award Finalist, and received both a 2018 Lupine Award from the Maine Library Association and a 2018 Maine Literary Award.

Her other novels include The Door to January (Islandport Press; Bram Stoker Award Finalist), The Lies They Tell (HarperTeen; 2018 Junior Library Guild Selection2019 International Thriller Award Finalist, an Amazon Bestselling New Release in both print and audio editions, 2019 Maine Literary Award Winner), The Missing Season (HarperTeen; 2019 Junior Library Guild Selection, starred review from Booklist), and her upcoming novel for teens, Sugaring Off (Algonquin Young Readers, 11/1/22). Her short fiction has placed in Writer’s Digest and Zoetrope: All Story contests, as well as appearing in such publications as Weirdbook.

George Jreije is the Lebanese-American author of Shad Hadid and the Alchemists of Alexandria, a forthcoming children's fantasy novel with HarperCollins. He has also written short stories published in collaboration with UNICEF. When not writing, George enjoys trying tasty Arabic pastries, messing with new yoga poses, and mentoring other writers.

Jo Knowles is the author of six novels, including Living With Jackie Chan, See You At Harry’s, Pearl, Jumping Off Swings, and Lessons from a Dead Girl. Her newest book, Read Between The Lines, was called “masterfully woven” in a starred review by Kirkus. Some of her awards include two SCBWI Crystal Kite Awards, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book, the PEN New England Children’s Book Discovery Award, an American Library Association Notable, Bank Street College’s Best Books for Children (Outstanding Merit), and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Jo has a master’s degree in children’s literature and teaches writing for young adults in the MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in Vermont with her husband and son.

Young adult novelist Maria Padian lives and writes from her home in midcoast Maine. Before devoting herself full-time to fiction she worked as a news reporter, congressional aide, radio essayist and freelance writer. These days, she takes breaks from the computer to text her grown children, take long walks along the beach, feed logs into the wood stove or work on her (tennis) backhand.

Jennifer Richard Jacobson, a graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the author of over a dozen award-winning children’s books including Small as an Elephant (IRA Young Adult’s Choice, Parents’ Choice Gold Award), Paper Things (ILA Social Justice Award, NTCE Charlotte Huck Honorable Mention) and The Dollar Kids illustrated by Ryan Andrews (ABA IndieNext List and Bank Street Best Book of the Year). Her newest launches are a chapter book series (Twig and Turtle: Big Move to a Tiny House) and a middle grade romance: Crashing in Love released in October 2021. She lives in Maine and when not writing, offers coaching and critiques.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9

How do today’s environmental writers create a balance between awe and terror, wonder and concern? Between narrating and describing and spurring readers to reflect, act, advocate, and change? On this panel, we’ll hear from authors whose work addresses environmental justice, the climate crisis, and the precarious relationship between humans and the planet.

Featured authors include Samaa Abdurraqib (Each Day Is Like an Anchor and editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast), Jason Anthony (Hoosh and the newsletter A Field Guide to the Anthropocene), Gregory Brown (The Lowering Days), and Jennifer Lunden (American Breakdown: Notes from an Industrialized Body, forthcoming from Harper Wave). Kathryn Miles (Trailed) will facilitate.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.

Jason Anthony was born in Maine in 1967, attended school and Clark University in Massachusetts, and earned his MA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Soon thereafter, he fled the warm world for Antarctica, where he worked in the United States Antarctic Program for eight austral summers as a Waste Management Specialist, Fuels Operator, Cargo Handler, Skiway Groomer, and Camp Supervisor. Anthony filled his Antarctic notebooks with the raw material for lyric essays, essays, and articles, some twenty three of which have been published since he last left the ice in 2004. His work has been featured in several publications, including Orion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and The Smart Set. One Antarctic essay was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2007, and another was a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2006.

Anthony's essay "Hoosh," published in the literary food journal Alimentum, inspired his first book, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine (University of Nebraska Press). Hoosh, a narrative and culinary history of Antarctica, won a 2012 Andre Simon Food and Drink Book Award, a 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year Award (Travel), a Silver Medal in the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Creative Nonfiction), and was a finalist for a 2013 Maine Literary Award (Nonfiction). The New York Times Book Review called Anthony “a fine, visceral writer and a witty observer," and The Independent (UK) described Hoosh as "one of the most enthralling studies of gastronomy ever published."

Anthony is the 2014 Literary Fellow for Maine, thanks to a fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. He lives in midcoast Maine with his wife, the singer-songwriter Heather Hardy.

Gregory Brown grew up along Penobscot Bay and still lives in Maine with his family. His work often explores the interaction of land and human influence, with a particular interest on social, cultural, and environmental issues in rural communities.

His short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Epoch, and Narrative Magazine, where he was a winner of the 30Below Prize. His non- fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, American Short Fiction, The Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, and The Millions. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

His debut novel, The Lowering Days, was a Publishers Marketplace 2021 Buzz Book, a Goodreads best debut novel, a Library Journal best debut novel, longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and won an AudioFile Magazine Earphones award.

Jennifer Lunden is the author of American Breakdown: Notes from an Industrialized Body, forthcoming from Harper Wave in 2023. A chapter from the book—which blends memoir, history, science and social criticism to explore the health hazards of industrial capitalism—was a Maine Literary Awards finalist, and her essay, “Evidence,” also a finalist, received a notable mention in Best American Essays. In 2020 her essay “Fugitive Justice” was the winner of the Maine Literary Awards short works competition in nonfiction.

Lunden’s creative nonfiction has been published in Longreads, Orion, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction, and DIAGRAM; her fiction in Eclectica, and Wigleaf; and poems in Sweet Lit, Peacock Journal, The Café Review, and other journals. In May 2015, accompanied by a circle of six dancers, she performed an original poem with Esduardo Mariscal Dance Theater, and in February 2020 Maine poet laureate Stuart Kestenbaum read her poem “In February” on Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here.

Her work has been anthologized in True Stories, Well Told: From The First 20 Years Of Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide And Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses. Her paper about the intersection of industrial capitalism and health as viewed through the lens of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was selected for the scholarly collection Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts.

The winner of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts, Lunden is the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts grants, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, and fellowships from Monson Arts, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dora Maar House in France.

She and her husband, the artist Frank Turek, live in a little house on the Portland peninsula, where they keep four chickens, two cats, and one Great Dane.

Kathryn Miles is an award-winning journalist and science writer. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Saint Louis University and took both her Master of Arts and Doctorate in English from the University of Delaware. The long-time editor of Hawk & Handsaw, Miles served as professor of environmental studies and writing at Unity College from 2001-2015 and has since taught in several graduate schools and low residency-MFA programs including, most recently, at Green Mountain College, where she was also writer-in-residence. Miles is the author of five books: Adventures with Ari, All Standing, Superstorm, Quakeland, and Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, The Boston Globe, Down East, Ecotone, History, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Politico, Popular Mechanics, and Time. She currently serves as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council, a faculty member for several MFA programs, and as a private consultant available for emerging and established writers. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9

Joshua Bennett, author of The Study of Human Life, Owed, Being Property Once Myself, and The Sobbing School, will perform his award-winning poetry.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2021, he received the Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.

Bennett has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.

Bennett’s writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9

No matter who we are, parenthood has the power to transform every aspect of our lives. Parenting exacerbates our vulnerabilities while also reawakening our senses of wonder and joy. This panel will feature authors whose work lays bare the complicated realities of present-day parenthood. What does it mean to raise a child within a queer household? What does it mean to become a father to a Black son? How do mothers grapple with desires outside the household?

Featured authors Kristen Arnett (With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things), Joshua Bennett (The Study of Human Life and Owed), and Lynn Steger Strong (Flight and Want) will share their insights and discuss their work. Chelsea Conaboy (journalist and author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood) will facilitate.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.

Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. Her next book (an untitled collection of short stories) will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House). She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and currently lives in Miami, Florida. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett 

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2021, he received the Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.

Bennett has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.

Bennett’s writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of Hold Still and, most recently, of the novel Want. She had a recurring column in The Guardian's “Two in Five” on the disappearing American middle class and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and Catapult.

Chelsea Conaboy is a journalist who writes about personal and public health. She was part of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, and her magazine writing has been published by Mother Jones, Politico, the Week, the Boston Globe Magazine, and others. Her first book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, will be published by Henry Holt & Co. in September 2022. She lives in Maine with her husband and their two children.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9

On this panel, we’ll hear from transnational writers whose work explores displacement, relocation, identity, and home. Sudanese-American writer Safia Elhillo (Girls That Never Die and Home is Not a Country), Somali-American author Abdi Nor Iftin (Call Me American), and Croatian writer Robert Perišić (A Cat at the End of the World) will discuss what it means to search for belonging across borders and write about home countries altered beyond recognition. Zahir Janmohamed (multi-genre author, educator, and co-founder of the podcast Racist Sandwich) will moderate. 

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).

Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Born in Mogadishu to nomadic parents, Abdi Nor Iftin survived famine, war, and child soldiering. Thanks to the movies available to him, he taught himself English by watching American action films. By repeating and imitating the carefree actors, he earned himself the nickname “Abdi American”. Through guerrilla journalism, Abdi dispatched stories about his life to a series titled Messages From Mogadishu on American Public Media. His stories were short listed for Peabody Awards in 2016. These stories were picked by NPR, the BBC and later This American Life.

After surviving a bombing at his house one evening in 2009, Abdi finally said goodbye to his home country and moved to Kenya where he and his brother lived as refugees. In an amazing stroke of luck, he won entrance to the U.S. in August 2014, in the annual visa lottery, though his route to America—ending in a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi—did not come easily.

Now Abdi is a bestselling and award-winning author based in the state of Maine. He’s been featured by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Abdi is an advocate for refugee and immigrant rights. He is dedicated to bringing people together through his stories of survival and resilience. He is currently working on a documentary based on his memoir Call Me American.

Robert Perišić is an Croatian author, born in Split in 1969. Translations of his works were published in numerous European countries and the US. He is best known for his prose, and also writes poetry, plays and film scripts.

His novel “Naš čovjek na terenu” (“Our Man in Iraq”) won the prestigious "Jutarnji list award" in Croatia. The American edition of the novel was included in US top translation lists in 2013, along with praise from critics (The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, National Public Radio, etc.) and writers, such as Jonathan Franzen. The German edition of the novel (‘Unser Mann vor Ort’) received ‘Literaturpreis der Steiermärkischen Sparkasse 2011’ in Graz, Austria.

The novel “Područje bez signala” (“Area With No Coverage”) published in 2015 was in finalist for the “Meša Selimović” award (Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the T-portal award for best Croatian novel, and the American and French edition are currently being prepared.

Published works: poetry collection “Dvorac Amerika” (“Castle America”) of 1995, short story collections “Možeš pljunuti onoga tko bude pitao za nas” (“You may spit on the person who asks about us”) of 1999 and “Užas i veliki troškovi” (“Terror And High Costs”) of 2002, novel “Naš čovjek na terenu” of 2007, essay “Uvod u smiješni ples” (“Introduction To a Funny Dance”) of 2011, poetry collection “Jednom kasnije” (“Once, Later”) of 2012, play “Kultura u predgrađu” (“Culture In the Suburbs”) staged in Gavella, Zagreb, in 2000, film script for the feature film “100 minuta Slave” (“100 Minutes of Glory”) of 2004, and the novel “Područje bez signala” of 2015.

Robert Perisic (Robert Perišić) lives in Zagreb and works as a freelance writer. 

Zahir Janmohamed is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded, Racist Sandwich, was nominated for a James Beard Award.

He has received fellowships from MacDowell, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Anne Cox Chambers fellowship for long-form journalism, as well as from Tin House, the Arab American National Museum, The Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Norman Mailer Center, and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. He is a three-time alumnus of the VONA workshop for writers of color, a 2017 fiction fellow at Kundiman, a 2017 New Voices Scholar, and the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Bakeless Fiction Scholarship at Bread Loaf.

His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, The Boston Review, The Guardian, McSweeney's, Scroll India, The Economic Times and many other publications.

His media appearances include NPR, CNN, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Live Wire, The Dear Sugar Podcast, and others.

Aside from his writing career, he has spent over a decade working in politics.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9

Award-winning poet Safia Elhillo, author of The January Children, Home is Not a Country, and Girls That Never Die, will perform her work.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).

Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Maine Lit Fest - Day 9

Famed Maine illustrators, including Chris Van Dusen (Big Truck, Little Island and If I Built a House) and Scott Nash (I’m Afraid Your Teddy is in Trouble Today and Sunken Treasures), will test their drawing skills, answer questions about their process of creating, and take drawing challenges from the audience. More information is forthcoming.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.

Chris Van Dusen worked for more than ten years as a freelance illustrator specializing in art for kids, doing mostly editorial work with illustrations appearing in magazines like Nickelodeon, Family Fun and Disney Adventures. One day, he started thinking about drawing a picture of a boat stuck high up in a tree, thinking that it would be a really funny and intriguing illustration. At the same time, a refrain kept running through his head- “Mr. Magee and his little dog, Dee/ Hopped in the car and drove down to the sea”. The combination of these two things eventually became his first book, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee, which was published in 2000. He’s been busy writing and illustrating children’s books ever since.

Scott Nash is an author, illustrator, and instigator. He illustrated the Flat Stanley books written by Jeff Brown, and designed the logos for Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Nick Jr., and Comedy Central. He wrote and illustrated The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate as well as Tuff Fluff: The Case of Duckie’s Missing Brain. Ten years ago he founded the illustration program at Maine College of Art. The program is now the largest department in the school. Nash attends many workshops and schools to teach students how to realize the value of creativity in their lives. “All too often children abandon drawing and painting because they believe they are ‘no good’ at art, as if creating only exists in the realm of those we define as artists,” says Nash. “I teach kids that creativity is open to everyone and hope to inspire them to write and draw throughout their lives.” Nash also runs NASHBOX, a graphic design and illustration company, with his wife, Nancy. Nash moved from Boston to Maine years ago to focus on making things daily, specifically to focus on his art, design, and children’s books.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9

Children of all ages and their families are invited to kick-off the day in Monument Square with a dynamic story hour! Local actors, artists, and community leaders will read aloud stories featuring diverse characters written by diverse authors.

Each child in attendance will receive a free book to take home.

Guest readers include Pious Ali, Shay Stewart-Bouley, and Glaisma Perez Silva.

This event is free.

Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.

Pious Ali is a dedicated public servant and an assertive and pragmatic leader with a compassionate diversified skill set in community organizing, activism and civic engagement. Pious is a Youth and Community Engagement Specialist at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service’s Portland Empowered, and he has spent the better part of his career focused on community engagement. He has created a meaningful and ongoing dialogue across cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, and faith-based barriers.

Chicago native Shay Stewart-Bouley, also known as Black Girl in Maine (or BGIM), had to learn a bit of Yankee ingenuity when she relocated to Maine in 2002. After a brief foray into education, she brought her socially-minded work from Chicago, where she worked with the homeless, to Maine by working with low-income and at-risk youth in southern Maine. She is currently the executive director of Community Change Inc., a nearly 50-year-old anti-racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. Shay has been blogging since 2008, frequently on matters of social justice and systemic racism, through her Black Girl In Maine website and, in 2011, she won a New England Press Association Award for her writing on race and diversity for the Portland Phoenix. Her writing also has been featured in a variety of Maine and national publications as well as several anthologies. In November 2016, she gave a TEDx talk called “Inequity, Injustice… Infection.” She is graduate of both DePaul University and Antioch University New England, and even though she works in Boston now, she is indeed still BGIM, continuing to reside in Maine.

Please join us for a bookfair of Maine Publishers and author collectives featuring recently published books for sale and select authors available to sign copies. A schedule of author signings is below.

Participating presses and author collectives include Alice James Books, Androscoggin Press, Backroad Press, Beloit Poetry Journal, Deerbrook Editions, Islandport Press, Locally Grown Books, Downeast Maine Writers, Littoral Books, the Maine Authors Collective at She Writes Press, Maine Authors Publishing, Sandorf Passage, Strange Wilds Press, The Telling Room, and Toad Hall Editions.

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 8

For close to two decades, National Magazine Award winner Rebecca Traister (author of Good and Mad and a writer-at-large for New York Magazine) has covered women in politics, media, and entertainment. Recently, her work has centered female anger and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Kerri Arsenault, whose investigative memoir Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. Rebecca and Kerri will have a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to write nonfiction as a woman in this political, cultural, and environmental moment in which it feels like so many things are on fire (and some things literally are). Susan Conley, author of five critically-acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction (including Landslide and Elsey Come Home), will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the Portland Public Library, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and Mechanics Hall.

This event is free, and RSVP is required. Please click the button above to reserve your seat.

Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.

Kerri Arsenault is co-founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University (TESS), contributing editor at Orion magazine, book critic, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Mill Town was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and top book pick for the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah magazine, People, Newsweek, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

For 2022–2023, Arsenault will be a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, where she will be working on two biography projects that orbit around her primary interest: the lives of ordinary people and their intersection with waste, pollutants, and toxicities.