2026 Craft Talk
How to Fall Down Into the Grass: Writing from the Natural World with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Taking inspiration from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day," join Aimee to look to the outdoors for observation and inspiration for several new poem drafts.
If you’re joining us in person, choose the one titled “In Person” and if you can’t be here in person, sign up for the Live Zoom version.
Friday May 15 from 2:00 - 4:00 at the Camden Public Library
$50.00 in person • $35.00 on Zoom
Explore Lucille Clifton’s art of poetic compression alongside Glenis Redmond’s Afro-Carolina Quilt Stitch. Through close reading, guided exercises, and generative drafting, participants will distill language. They will craft powerful poems that bring memory and testimony forward.
Glenis Redmond is Greenville’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, a Cave Canem and a Baldwin Arts Fellow. She’s published eight books including, The Listening Skin and Over Yonder: A Poet’s Exploration of South Carolina State Parks.
How do we discover what we don’t know we know or feel and get underneath our immediate or habitual reactions? This workshop will feature prompts that try to surprise us into new ways of approaching our work and concerns.
Betsy Sholl has published ten collections of poetry. She is faculty emerita in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.
We will look at a variety of poems, from Hafez to Mary Oliver, to learn how to contextualize the lyric poem, so the personal transcends the concerns of the "I" and moves outward to larger issues—social, political, and philosophical.
Sandra Lynn Hutchison has published two books of poetry, a memoir, and a translation of Mahvash Sabet's prison poems. She is the recipient of a Jane Kenyon Poetry Fellowship and Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize.
2026 Festival Workshops
This year the Workshops will all be 2 hours long and they’re scheduled from 10:00am - 12:00pm at the main event location—Congregational Church at 55 Elm Street in Camden. We are asking people to sign up ahead of time and pay a nominal fee of $10.
Please choose the workshop you’d like to attend and purchase it here through the website, if you have any questions please contact us!
We will read and write poetic forms that reflect and respond to themselves. Using mirror and contrapuntal poems by Jamaal May, Rita Dove, and Tarfia Faizullah, we will consider how these forms shift meaning and depth.
Samaa Abdurraqib, a certified Maine Master Naturalist and Executive Director of Maine Humanities, is the author of Towards a Retreat and editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast.
We will explore Edna St. Vincent Millay’s girlhood in Camden through examples from her juvenilia to see how the themes that would dominate her adult poetry – nature, romantic love, and sense of self – began.
Jen Munson, a National Board Certified teacher has over 25 years of teaching experience at Camden Hills Regional High School. Operations Manager of Millay House, she is currently working on a collection of Millay’s juvenilia.
Can't be at the Festival in person? Register here to listen to Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Keynote talk on Zoom.
When the world feels too heavy, when the blank page looks like a sky without stars—what do we do? Aimee Nezhukumatathil invites writers to consider what the night creatures already know: that darkness is not absence, but invitation. Through a fresh look at nocturnal animals and bioluminescent beings as teachers, this talk encourages and gives concrete tips on how to keep creating, how to keep glowing, even when light feels far away. This talk will remind writers that their unique voices are necessary glimmers in the larger constellation of literature, and that resilience often looks like sitting still long enough to notice what begins to glow.
Register here to experience the 2026 Keynote on Zoom. You’ll receive a link to the talk the morning of the event. The $10 fee covers our technical expenses.