We’re very excited to announce upcoming readings of award-winning poetry by the wonderful poets Linda Aldrich, Gibson Fay-Leblanc, Deborah Cummins and Christian Barter! Please save the date for our two evenings of poetry:
Tuesday, April 29th, 6:00 P.M. – Linda Aldrich and Gibson Fay-Leblanc
Thursday, May 8th, 6:00 P.M. – Christian Barter and Deborah Cummins
Read more about our poets below!
Linda Aldrich
Linda Aldrich has published two collections of poetry, Foothold (2008, Finishing Line Press) and March and Mad Women (2012, Cherry Grove Collections).
Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, among them Crazy Woman Creek, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, Elixir, The Denver Quarterly, Ellipsis, The Florida Review, The Ilanot Review, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Puerto del Sol, Snake Nation Review, The Best of Write Action, and Words and Images. Her poem “Woman-without-Arms” won the Emily Dickinson Award 2000 from Universities West Press.
Linda is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire (English and French), Florida State University (MA Theatre Arts), and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA/ Poetry). She was director of the Young Conservatory and a member of the repertory at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco for ten years and later was Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colorado. She has taught Critical Thinking and Writing courses at Keene State College. Currently, Linda is secretary of the board of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (MWPA) in Portland.
Gibson Fay-Leblanc
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2012. The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, spent several weeks on the Poetry Foundation’s list of contemporary best-sellers, and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic, and Tin House as well as on the PBS NewsHour’s Art Beat, and are forthcoming in jubilat, Slice, and The Literary Review.
Christian Barter
Christian Barter is the author of three books of poetry: In Someone Else’s House (BkMk Press of UMKC), The Singers I Prefer (a Lenore Marshall Prize finalist) and Secret Evidence, a book-length poem forthcoming from BOA Editions. His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Epoch, Georgia Review and The American Scholar and featured on Poetry Daily, Poets and Writers and The PBS Newshour. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and was the 2008-2009 Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University. He is the supervisor of a trail crew in Bar Harbor, teaches poetry at College of the Atlantic, and is an editor for The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Deborah Cummins
Deborah Cummins is the author of an essay collection, Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine, published in 2013, as well as two collections of poetry, Counting the Waves and Beyond the Reach. Her poems and essays have appeared in eight anthologies, more than sixty journals and magazines, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac multiple times. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, she was most recently the winner of the 2013 and 2012 Maine Literary Award in Short Works of Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2013 Book Award in Non-Fiction. She has taught and led workshops at the University of Chicago, the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, the Terra Museum of American Art and the Newberry Library, both of Chicago, and has been a writer-in-residence at various high schools. From 2001 to 2005, she was the first Chair of the Board of the Poetry Foundation and served on the board until 2011. She and her husband split the year between their Deer Isle residence and an apartment in her native Chicago.