Poetry and Education

the panelists

• Nicholas Donohue serves as commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education, where his role is to provide support, service and technical assistance to the State Board of Education, the governor’s office, the Legislature, and other groups in the areas of legal matters, resource development, and other initiatives leading to educational improvement. Donohue received his BA from Wesleyan University and his M.Ed. from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Donohue has also been an elementary school teacher and a program administrator.

• Margaret-Love Denman, associate professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire, was born and raised in Mississippi and educated in the public schools there. The author of A Scrambling After Circumstance, chosen for the Penguin Contemporary American Fiction series, and Novel Ideas, she has recently finished a new novel, Daily, Before Your Eyes. In addition to her writing and teaching, she has worked as a child welfare worker, an advocate for public televison and a mother of five.

• Sydney Lea is author of a novel, A Place of Mind, a book of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, and seven collections of poetry. His most recent collection, Pursuit of a Wound, was one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and the one just before, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, won the 1998 Poets' Prize. He lives in Newbury, Vermont.

• Marguerite Mathews is New Hampshire’s Artist Laureate and co-founder of the Pontine Movement Theatre, which chronicles the history and literature of New England in its innovative productions. Using masks, puppetry and movement, Marguerite and Greg Gathers have created works about NH artist, Maxfield Parrish; Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece Country of the Pointed Firs; the Shakers; and produced a unique staging of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Marguerite has been performing and teaching at universities, public and private schools, museums, community centers, and for the media since 1977.

• Kay Morgan is an English and American studies teacher at Oyster River High School in Durham, NH. She has been the school’s artist- in-residence coordinator for many artistic projects and is the Christa McAuliffe Teaching Fellow for 2002-2003. Kay has taught high school courses in poetry and fiction, and she is a published poet.

• Poet Mimi White is a veteran community artist and past NH State Council on the Arts fellowship winner. In 1999, she was short-listed with America's most skilled community artists for the national initiative "Artists & Communities: American Creates for the Millennium". She has received two New Works grants from the NH State Council on the Arts for "Hair (Piece)," a reading of poetry and prose celebrating the power and beauty of hair, and "Lies and Dreams: Conversations with Our Mothers Mary Louise and Dorothy," a collaboration with weaver, Sarah Haskell. She is currently on the faculty at Lesley College. Her teaching goals are to ignite students’ imaginations, encourage articulation of each student’s voice and vision, and expose students to the rich world of poetry, prose and memoir writing.

• Baron Wormser is Poet Laureate of Maine and the author of five books of poetry. He is also the co-author of Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves, and has taught poetry at every level from primary through graduate school. He directs the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH, and the Frost Place Seminar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.