Poetry in the Garden

Original post by Maine Historical Society, Portland, Maine

Join us for a free poetry reading in the Longfellow Garden August 4th at 5:30! Readers include Megan Grumbling, Steve Luttrell, and Kevin Sweeney.

Free and open to the public. Works from the authors will be on sale at the event.

Megan Grumbling’s collection Booker’s Point, awarded the Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry, was released by the University of North Texas Press this April. Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Memorious, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is librettist of the new spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, co-created with composer Denis Nye, which premiered this May in Portland, Maine; and she reviews theater for the Portland Phoenix, serves as reviews editor for Café Review, and teaches at UNE and SMCC.

Steve Luttrell is the founder and publishing editor of the acclaimed Café Review, which has published for a remarkable 25 years, including the work of twelve Pulitzer Prize winners. Former Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine, he has his own TV show (Poet’s Café), giving him a strong presence in the region and a large following among New England poets and writers. His intimate, unassuming voice is driven by a musician’s sense of rhythm and a deceptive simplicity. His editions of poetry include Home Movies, Conditions, The Vagaries: A Writer’s Sequence, and Pemaquid and Other Poems. Plumb Line secures Luttrell’s place as an important voice in contemporary poetry.

Kevin Sweeney is a Pittsburgh native who spent his early childhood years on Peaks Island, Maine. He has published poems in a variety of journals and is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He has three books–Rags of Prayer, Ordinary Time, and Imminent Tribulations–from Moon Pie Press. He has taught at Southern Maine Community College since 1983 where he is department chair of English and shop steward for his union. He also serves an assistant poetry editor at the Café Review. He loves all cats and dogs and even many people.