Spend time with a variety of poetic voices at this year’s reading. Word welcomes the following poets to our stage: Meg Weston, co-founder of both Poets Corner and the Camden Poetry Festival; Chen Chen, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and three editions of The Best American Poetry; Meghan Sterling, Program Director at MWPA and winner of the Paul Nemser Book Prize (2022). Finally, in a special tribute, Maine’s fifth Poet Laureate (2016-2021) Stuart Kestenbaum will read the work of the late Paul Nemser of Harborside, poet of “a thousand brilliances’ (Red Mountain Press), who died earlier this year.
Free event
Chen Chen’s second book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions), was a best book of 2022 according to the Boston Globe, Electric Lit, NPR, and others. It was also named a 2023 Notable Book by the American Library Association. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions), was long-listed for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including The New York Times and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. The 2018-2022 Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.
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.
Meghan Sterling, Maine poet, Program Director at MWPA, and Associate Poetry Editor for the Maine Review, she has released three collections of poetry in 2023. View from a Borrowed Field won Lily Poetry Review's Paul Nemser Book Prize. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) was released in April, and Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press), this past summer. Her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021). She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis (Littoral Books, 2023) and an earlier chapbook, How We Drift (Blue Lyra). Meghan’s work has been published in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, and Rattle, and was featured poet in Frost Meadow Review’s (2020).
Meg Weston is a singular creative. Co-founder of both the Camden Poetry Festival and of the online community The Poets Corner, Meg’s latest collection of poems, Magma Intrusions (Kelsay Books, September 2023) draws on her fascination with volcanoes, on family and on life in Maine. She’s traveled around the world witnessing the power of the earth in its processes of destruction, creation and transformation. Meg recently retired from her position as President of Maine Media Workshops + College, where she established The Writers Harbor program to complement the media arts curricula. Meg completed an MFA in Creative Writing (2008), with an interdisciplinary emphasis on creative non-fiction and photography. Over the past ten years she has studied poetry, especially under the guidance of inaugural poet, Richard Blanco.
Paul Erwin Nemser (1950-2023) loved poetry from his first nursery rhymes, to the last poem he read, “Shelley's The Triumph of Life”. He published two co-translations of Ukrainian poetry, three books of poetry: Taurus, A Thousand Curves, and Break On Through, and dozens of poems in literary magazines. Born in Portland, OR, he studied poetry at Harvard with Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop, creative writing at Columbia School for the Arts, and had a long, distinguished career as partner in a prestigious Boston law firm. Paul, his wife Rebecca and son, Alexander spent many happy summers at their home in Harborside, ME. The Lily Poetry Review calls him a “Master of the lyric narrative”. The Paul Nemser Book Prize is awarded annually.