Word’s popular Poetry Crawl returns! Join us on an easy walk around Blue Hill village to hear a sequence of readings by remarkable poets, one poet at each of five local venues.
2:30-2:50 Blue Hill Books Dawn Potter
3:05-3:25 Shaw Institute Nyamuon “Moon” Macher
3:40-4:00 John Murphy Trail Maya Stein
4:10-5:10 Cong. Church Gibson Fay-LeBlanc & Stuart Kestenbaum
Note: The John Murphy Trail can be accessed behind the Congregational Church
Free event
Dawn Potter is the current poet laureate of Maine. The author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry, she has also won a Maine Literary Award for nonfiction and has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writer's Center, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, and many other journals. She leads poetry programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland.
Nyamuon “Moon” Nguany Machar is a South Sudanese American spoken-word poet, documentary filmmaker, cultural advocate, and community leader who came to Maine as a refugee child. She was a writer, producer, and central subject of both I Come From Away: An Immigrant in Maine films, created with director Charles Stuart. A former Telling Room lead teacher, Moon is also an Indigo Arts Alliance artist alumna. Her honors include the Bazelon Center’s Rising Advocate Award, the Luol Deng Foundation Diaspora Award, recognition among 2024 Top Ten Mainers to Be Thankful For, and 2026 Justice for Women Courage Is Contagious Award.
Maya Stein is a poet, writing facilitator, and creative adventuress who has traveled several thousand miles by bicycle across various parts of the country towing a typewriter behind her, inviting strangers to respond to writing prompts. She has kept a short-form writing practice, “10-line Tuesday,” for more than 20 years, sending out a 10-line poem each week to more than 2,000 readers. Her hobbies include juggling, origami folding, diorama making, hors d’oeuvres creation, and she has recently learned how to play mahjong and make potholders. Maya served as the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine from 2023-2025 and is the director of the Belfast Poetry Festival.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His second book, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and his prose in Kenyon Reviewonline, Portland Magazine, and Slice. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family.
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections off poems, and a collection of essays The View from Here. In 2024 he, along with his wife visual artist Susan Webster, published A Quiet Book, a collection of collages and improvised handwritten text. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for 27 years, where he established innovative programs combining craft and writing and craft and new technologies. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented Monson Arts, a residency program for artists and writers. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.