Alicia Anstead is a writer, editor, producer and educator. She is the director for programming at the Office for the Arts at Harvard, where she also teaches narrative journalism. She is formerly the executive editor of Inside Arts, the magazine for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Washington, DC, and of The Writer magazine in Boston. As an arts reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, she also covered food and food writing (and worked in Maine restaurant kitchens). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, The Harvard Gazette and Art New England. She has been an arts contributor to The Callie Crossley Show and Under the Radar with Callie Crossley on WGBH in Boston and NPR's Morning Edition. An English department graduate of American University (B.A.) and the University of Maine (M.A.), she has been a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and NEA arts editor program at Duke University. She has been a contributing producer, editor and strategist for APAP|NYC, the largest annual conference of performing arts professionals, the Sphinx Organization where she co-produced the first two SphinxCon conferences on diversity in the arts, the Boston Book Festival, Shakespeare in Stonington at Opera House Arts, Sister Cities International and the National Archives Foundation. (Photo credit: Michele Stapleton)

Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China; grew up in Massachusett;, and received a PhD from Texas Tech University. His new book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is published by BOA Editions. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017, BOA), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award. Chen is also the author of five chapbooks and the forthcoming book of craft essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God (2024, Noemi Press). His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, and 2021). He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He is the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama's favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023.

George Emlen, who lives in Blue Hill, is a conductor, composer, arranger, song-leader and music educator in Maine and Massachusetts. For 32 years he was music director of Revels, the Boston-based, national organization behind the annual Christmas Revels, a rich and joyful celebration of the winter solstice. In Maine he founded and conducted the Acadia Choral Society, while also conducting the Oratorio Chorale and the Mount Desert Summer Chorale. George has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he directed the Conservatory Camerata; Lesley University in the Creative Arts in Learning program; the College of the Atlantic, and the University of Maine. In recent years he has worked with Bobby McFerrin in the vocal improvisatory genre of Circlesinging.

With a career background spanning magazine publishing, marketing and education, Emily Greenberg has been resident of midcoast Maine since 2021. Inspired by the Pine Tree State’s patchwork quilt of interesting people who value good conversation, she embarked (for the first time) on creating a podcast, The Maine Conversation. Conducting her interviews in the field, Emily introduces her listeners to Mainers ranging from goat dairy farmers and folk musicians to rock climbers and puffin researchers.

Adeena Karasick is an acclaimed poet/performer/cultural critic. Opera Wire writes, “Karasick’s spoken-word performance sizzles your ears with the breathy heat of her voice… hypnotic waves of text roll and break, sometimes starting as whispers before sliding into chant-like passages that culminate in a libidinous frenzy.”

Marty Kelley is currently a children’s author and illustrator but has, in the past, been a second grade teacher, a baker, a cartoonist, a newspaper art director, a drummer in a heavy metal band, a balloon delivery guy, an animator, and lots of other things.

He’s written and illustrated many of his own published picture books and chapter books (Ollie and Prema, Almost Everybody Farts, Pugnapped!) as well as having illustrated several books for other authors (Santa’s Underwear, I’m an Alien and I Want to Go Home).

Get the whole scoop at martykelley.com.

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.

Dan Kois is a longtime writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate. He's the author of two novels, Vintage Contemporaries and the forthcoming Hampton Heights. With Isaac Butler he co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of "Angels in America", a Stonewall Honor title, and he's also the author of a memoir, How to Be a Family, and a book of music criticism, Facing Future. He lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.

The New York Times Book Review writes, “In Lehrer’s books, words take on thought’s very form, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow.”

Jason Moon is a senior reporter and producer on New Hampshire Public Radio's Document team. He has created documentary podcast series on topics including unsolved murders, secret lists of police officers, and overdose deaths that are prosecuted as homicides. Jason's work includes Bear Brook seasons one and two, which together have been downloaded more than 28 million times by listeners in over 150 countries. Stephen King called both seasons, “the best true crime podcasts I’ve ever heard. Brilliant, involving, hypnotic.” The New Yorker magazine called Bear Brook S1 one of the best podcasts of 2018.

Brooksville resident Jim Picariello is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker breaking into Hollywood from rural, coastal Maine. It's a surefire plan!

His feature scripts (The Cult of Us, Igor and Frankie) have been optioned and signed into shopping agreements, and have placed high in prestigious contests such as The Black List, The Nicholl Fellowship, Stowe Story Labs, and The Austin Film Festival. His award tally has landed him in the all-time top 1% and 2% on the screenplay ranking website Coverfly.

His short films (The Mushroom Huntress and Passive Aggressive Dads, among others) have been selected by dozens of wicked-fancy film festivals and have won, in total, fifteen top awards.

Jim even made a short for Sesame Street! (Anything you want to know about the Number Six, just ask.)

A.O. Scott is critic at large at the New York Times Book Review, where he writes essays about literature, culture and politics. Before that, he spent 23 years as a film critic for the Times, during which time he reviewed almost 3,000 movies and saw thousands more. He is the author of Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth, and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Meghan Sterling’s publications include the collection View from a Borrowed Field (2023, winner of the Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize), and her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (2021, Terrapin Books). Her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners is forthcoming from Everybody Press in 2023. She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis (2023, Littoral Books) and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The West Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, the Mom Egg Review and others. She is Associate Poetry Editor for the Maine Review. She works as Program Director for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland, Maine.

Best known as “Paul” of the multi-platinum-selling group Peter, Paul & Mary—and for writing and performing “The Wedding Song”—Noel Paul Stookey has been a singer and songwriter since the 1960s. As an independent musician living in Blue Hill, his newest compositions address major issues from climate change to gun control.