2026 Festival Workshops & Craft Talk

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 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.

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.

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.