2026 Festival Workshops & Craft Talk
Craft Talk with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Register here for the Craft Talk with Aimee on Friday May 15 from 2:00 - 4:00pm at the Camden Public Library.
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.
You can also register to see Aimee’s Keynote talk on Zoom, Saturday May 16 at 4:15.
Scholarships are available for the Craft Talk as well as for any of the Workshops. Please reach out to request a scholarship.
2026 Craft Talk with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Taking inspiration from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day," we will look to the outdoors for observation and inspiration for several new poem drafts.
Taking inspiration from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day," we will look to the outdoors for observation and inspiration for several new poem drafts.
If you can’t be at the 2026 Festival in person, sign up to participate in Aimee’s Craft Talk online. Register here, and you’ll receive an email with a link to the Zoom call the morning of the event.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of the forthcoming poetry book, Night Owl (Mar. 2026), and two illustrated collections of essays, Bite by Bite and World of Wonders: Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. She also wrote four previous award-winning poetry collections, and with the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review.
2026 Saturday 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.
Choose the workshop you’d like to attend and purchase it here through the website, if you have any questions please contact us!
IMPORTANT NOTE: All 5 workshops are Live and in person in Camden, there is not an option to attend remotely. All workshops are scheduled from 10:00 - 12:00, so please choose the one you’d most like to attend.
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.
This workshop is Saturday May 16 from 10:00am - 12:00pm at the Congregational Church in Camden.
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.
This workshop is Saturday May 16 from 10:00am - 12:00pm at the Congregational Church in Camden.
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.
This workshop is Saturday May 16 from 10:00am - 12:00pm at the Congregational Church in Camden.
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.
This workshop is Saturday May 16 from 10:00am - 12:00pm at the Congregational Church in Camden.
Poets have always called out to whatever they consider holy: God, the Goddess, a higher power, nature, the unfathomable. We reach out with ‘why’ questions, such as ‘Why is this happening?’ or ‘how’ questions, such as ‘How can I keep a good heart in this world?’ These poems can be powerful expressions of joy, sorrow, anger, anguish, confusion, wonder—even curiosity and playfulness—and they offer conversations that are interesting, deep, and deeply personal. In this generative workshop, we will work from psalms and poems, employing a form of Lectio Divina—a contemplative way of engaging with a text that invites the writer to create their own work and offers a pathway towards writing in dialogue with whatever you consider holy.
Donna Spruijt-Metz has published four books of poetry, she’s an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, former classical flutist, and briefly, a rock and roll bassist.
Is the Workshop You Wanted Full? Get Yourself on the Waitlist and in the meantime, check out the other workshops still available
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Yes! Aimee’s Craft Talk and her Keynote will both be offered live on Zoom for anyone who is unable to attend the Festival in person.
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You can send us an email at: camdenfestivalofpoetry@gmail.com, or go to our Contact page and fill out the form there. We’ll respond as soon as we can!