Kearsarge Poetry Festival
Saturday, October 7, 2006, Wilmot, NH

POETS AND PRESENTERS

David W. Cook, poet and musician from Elkins, NH, is a member of the New London Poetry Posse. His forthcoming book, Pipers and Pirates and Songs-in-Between, includes six stories and 18 poems. Recently retired after a 37-year career as an investment counselor, he is a frequent hiker on the Sunapee-Ragged-Kearsarge Greenway, a 75-mile trail loop that includes hiking areas near Donald Hall’s home.

Chard deNiord is the author of three books of poetry, Asleep in the Fire, Sharp Golden Thorn, and Night Mowing. His poems and essays have appeared in such publications as The American Scholar, The New England Review, Gettysburg Review, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry, The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. He is an associate professor of English at Providence College and program director of the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.

Tom Eslick has published several mysteries, including the most recent, Mountain Peril. He has taught English for more than 30 years on both secondary school and college levels and has served as chairman of the English department at Proctor Academy for 19 years. Well-known regionally as a professional singer-songwriter, he has several albums to his credit and recently released a CD of his original compositions. He earned an MFA in creative writing at Emerson College and is now working on a new novel.

Patricia Fargnoli, the current New Hampshire Poet Laureate, is the author of three books and two chapbooks. She was awarded the 2005 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry for Duties of the Spirit and the 1999 May Swenson Book Award for Necessary Light. A Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a frequent resident at The Dorset Colony, she has taught at The Frost Place, the NH Institute of Art, and in the Lifelong Learning Program of Keene State College.

Jeff Friedman is the author of four poetry collections, including Black Threads. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The New Republic, among others. He has won two fellowships from the NH State Arts Council, the Editor's Prize from The Missouri Review, and the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize. His residencies include MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Now at work on a book of translations, he teaches in the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.

Donald Hall was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2006 and will begin his term this fall. He has published fifteen books of poetry, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone, a selection of poems from 1946 to 2006. Among his children’s books, Ox-Cart Man won the Caldecott Medal. He has also published many books of prose, including Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, essays on poetry. Among his numerous awards for poetry are the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Award. He has also received two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He served two terms as New Hampshire Poet Laureate, beginning in 1984 and 1995. Since 1994 he has been writer-in-residence in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont. He lives in Wilmot, NH.

Hope Jordan's nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Sun, Green Mountains Review, and the anthology Scream When You Burn. She has a dual degree in magazine journalism and English from Syracuse University and is a three-time alumna of the Chenango Valley Writers Conference at Colgate University. She has also competed in poetry slams in Boston, New York, and Manchester, NH. For more than a decade, she has been a member of the Concord-based writing group The Yogurt Poets, and she is currently an NHWP trustee. She lives in Canterbury, NH.

Jane Kenyon received many literary honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named New Hampshire Poet Laureate in 1995. She lived and worked in Wilmot, NH, with her husband Donald Hall until her death from leukemia in 1995. Her four volumes of poetry and her translation of Anna Akhmatova’s poems appear together with several previously unanthologized poems in Collected Poems, published in 2005. A Hundred White Daffodils includes essays, interviews, and newspaper columns. In her honor, the New Hampshire Writers’ Project established the Jane Kenyon Award, a biennial prize given to a New Hampshire poet who has published an exceptional book of poetry.

Maxine Kumin is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, the Harvard Arts Medal for 2005, and the 2006 Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America. Her fifteenth poetry collection, Jack and Other New Poems, was published in 2005. Her many publications include three essay collections, a short story collection, four novels, and an animal rights murder mystery, Quit Monks or Die! She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a post that is now called U.S. Poet Laureate, in 1981 and 1982 and as New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1994. She is currently Distinguished Poet in Residence in the MFA in Poetry program at New England College. She lives with her husband of 59 years on a horse farm in Warner, NH.

Alice Mattison has published four novels and several story collections, including In Case We’re Separated, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of a collection of poems, Animals. Mattison’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. She won the Lawrence Foundation Prize from the Michigan Quarterly Review in 2005. She has taught fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College since 1995. She lives in New Haven, CT.

Alicia Ostriker, twice a finalist for the National Book Award, has published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven. Her most recent prose book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. Ostriker's many honors include the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ, and teaches in the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.

Joyce Peseroff has been a writer-in-residence and visiting professor at University of Massachusetts - Boston since 1997. Her latest book of poems is Eastern Mountain Time. She is the editor of Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, and The Ploughshares Poetry Reader. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize. New poems are in recent issues of Greensboro Review, Salamander, Barrow Street, Provincetown Arts, and the on-line magazine Slate.

Mike Pride is editor of the Concord Monitor, where he has worked since 1978. He is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is serving his eighth year as a member of the Pulitzer Prize board. The National Press Foundation named him editor of the year in 1987 for directing the Monitor's coverage of the Challenger disaster. He also won the Yankee Quill Award for contributions to New England journalism. Pride is coauthor of My Brave Boys, a New Hampshire Civil War history. He contributed a chapter to Joyce Peseroff's 2005 book, Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Pride's latest book, coauthored with Steve Raymond, is Too Dead to Die, the story of a Bataan Death March survivor.

Liam Rector’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. His books of poems include American Prodigal and the forthcoming The Executive Director of the Fallen World. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Rector founded and directs the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College. He lives in New York City.

Tree Swenson is the executive director of the Academy of American Poets, which sponsors Poets.org, National Poetry Month, the Poetry Audio Archive, American Poet, and awards to poets. She was previously the publisher and executive director of Copper Canyon Press, which she cofounded in 1972.  

Tree Swenson, Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets, introduces Donald Hall at the October 7 Writers' Block Party in Wilmot, NH. Photo by Randy Brow.

 

Dianalee Velie has taught poetry, memoir, and short story at universities and colleges in New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Her award-winning poetry and short stories have been published widely in literary journals in the U.S. and Canada. She teaches poetry in rural school systems in Vermont and New Hampshire for the Children's Literacy Foundation. She has an MA in Writing from Manhattanville College, where she has served as faculty advisor of Inkwell Magazine and taught advanced poetry workshops in the graduate writing program.

Laurie Zimmerman’s work has been published in Mid-American Review, Orion, Rattle, 5 AM, Paterson Literary Review, Image, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Hidden Branches was published in 1984; her first full-length collection, Body of Tender Water, is seeking a publisher. She received an Excellence in Writing Award from the Milton Center, and her poetry has been featured on NH Public Radio. A former poetry editor at Radix Magazine, she recently earned an MFA in literature and creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Proctor Academy in Andover, NH.