Kifah Abdulla is a poet, artist, writer, teacher, performer and activist. He was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq. Abdulla spent over eight years as a prisoner of war in Iran and over twenty years as a refugee. He is currently the Arabic teacher at Southern Maine Community College, The Language Exchange in Portland Maine, as well as the Arabic calligraphy teacher at Maine College of Art. His first book of poetry, Dead Still Dream, was published in 2016. He is a member of the Portland Public Art Committee (PPAC), has his own radio show, "Poetry and Music" at WMPG.

Ekhlas Ahmed is a refugee and activist from Darfur, Sudan. She fled with her family to Egypt and lived there for two years before being resettled in Portland, Maine in 2005. She is the founder of Chance To Advance an organization raising awareness in her community of the violence and needs in Darfur. She is currently working on an autobiography in poetry form.

Linda Aldrich is currently Portland, Maine’s poet laureate and has published two collections of poetry, March and Mad Women and Foothold, with a new book, Ballast, coming this winter. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and her poem “Woman-without-Arms” won the Emily Dickinson Award from Universities West Press.

Charlotte Agell is an author/illustrator of 14 books for children and young adults. Her latest books (Maybe Tomorrow?, a picture book illustrated by Ana Ramirez, and Mud, Sand, and Snow, a board book illustrated by the author) focus on grief, loss, and the healing power of friendship.

Alicia Anstead is a writer, editor, producer and educator. She is the director for programming at the Office for the Arts at Harvard, where she also teaches narrative journalism. She is formerly the executive editor of Inside Arts, the magazine for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Washington, DC, and of The Writer magazine in Boston. As an arts reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, she also covered food and food writing (and worked in Maine restaurant kitchens). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, The Harvard Gazette and Art New England. She has been an arts contributor to The Callie Crossley Show and Under the Radar with Callie Crossley on WGBH in Boston and NPR's Morning Edition. An English department graduate of American University (B.A.) and the University of Maine (M.A.), she has been a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and NEA arts editor program at Duke University. She has been a contributing producer, editor and strategist for APAP|NYC, the largest annual conference of performing arts professionals, the Sphinx Organization where she co-produced the first two SphinxCon conferences on diversity in the arts, the Boston Book Festival, Shakespeare in Stonington at Opera House Arts, Sister Cities International and the National Archives Foundation. (Photo credit: Michele Stapleton)

Kerri Arsenault is a book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, and a contributing editor at The Literary Hub. She is also a mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program. Her work has appeared in Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, Down East, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review of Books, and Air Mail. Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, is her first book.

Tina Bennett is a literary agent who specializes in narrative nonfiction, literary journalism, idea books, politics, history, current affairs, memoir, and academic crossover titles. Her clients include Atul Gawande, Malcolm Gladwell, Lev Grossman, Laura Hillenbrand, Hope Jahren, Patrick Radden Keefe, Jill Lepore, Dahlia Lithwick, Alex Ross, and Eric Schlosser. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Richard Blanco, the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, is the youngest and the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. Born in Spain to Cuban exile parents, he was raised in Miami. The negotiation of cultural identity characterizes his four collections of poetry: “City of a Hundred Fires,” “Directions to The Beach of the Dead,” “Looking for The Gulf Motel” and his latest book of poems, “How to Love a Country.” His memoir “The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood” won a Lambda Literary Award. “One Today,” his inaugural poem, was published as a children’s book. He has a home in Bethel.

Mia Bogyo is the Education Programs Manager for CMCA. She is an arts educator and community artist with experience teaching all ages for schools, non-profits, and art centers. She received a BFA in K-12 Art Education from USM in Portland, ME and an alumnus of GSA.

Bundy H. Boit is a playwright and composer. Her first musical, Freedom Train, was an adaptation of the book by the same title about the life of Harriet Tubman. Students and staff of Penobscot Community School performed this work in 1986. Another musical, Hatty, based on the life of Harriet Jacobs, enslaved in North Carolina, has enjoyed staged readings by Waldo Theatre, Belfast Maskers and Opera House Arts. Given a full production by Waldo Theatre, Boit’s musical Coming Home features a quirky Irish woman bound for America. New Surry Theatre performed a virtual staged reading of Somewhere Voices written with Boit’s sister, Anne Harding Woodworth. Upon moving with her family to Penobscot in 1973, Boit eagerly read the novels of Mary Ellen Chase and has recently enjoyed writing Time Ago, Mary Ellen Chase Remembers.

Ellen Booraem spent 20 years as a Hancock County journalist before she quit her day job to write three fantasies for readers age 10 and older (The Unnameables, Small Persons with Wings, and Texting the Underworld). A fourth book is due out in 2021. She volunteers as a writing coach for middle-school students at the Brooklin School.

Julia Bouwsma, Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, lives off the grid in the mountains of western Maine. Bouwsma’s two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), received Maine Literary Awards for Poetry Book. She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME and teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Taryn Bowe’s short stories have appeared in Boston Review, PANK, Sycamore Review, The Greensboro Review, and Redivider, and have received special recognition in The Best American Non-required Reading Series. She has taught writing workshops to women at Maine’s Correctional Center, adolescents who have survived suicide loss, and Portland-area high school students. Before joining MWPA as the associate director, Bowe worked as a Health Policy Research Associate at the Muskie School of Public Service. She received her A.B. in Neuroscience and Religion from Bowdoin College and has a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine. She lives in Brunswick with her husband and daughter.

Former Poet Laureate of her small town of Belfast, Maine, Linda Buckmaster’s poetry, essay, and fiction have appeared in over thirty journals and four anthologies. She has held residencies at Vermont Studios Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Obras Foundation, among others. Linda taught in the University of Maine System for 25 years and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. Her hybrid memoir, Space Heart. A Memoir in Stages, was recently published by Burrow Press. She is currently working on a literary journey across the North Atlantic following the cod. lindabuckmaster.com.

John Cariani is an award-winning stage, film and television actor who grew up in Presque Isle, Cariani is the author of four popular plays. His debut play, “Almost Maine,” is one of the most frequently produced plays in the country.

Ayelet Waldman is the author of the memoir, A Really Good Day, as well as of novels including Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons, and with Michael Chabon, of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation and Fight of the Century. She is a creator and writer of Netflix’s award-winning Unbelievable.

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of many books, including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road,Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Pops, and the picture book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man. He is the editor, with Ayelet Waldman, of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation and Fight of the Century. He is a creator and writer of Netflix’s award-winning Unbelievable, and a writer and creator of Star Trek: Picard.

Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China; grew up in Massachusett;, and received a PhD from Texas Tech University. His new book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is published by BOA Editions. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017, BOA), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award. Chen is also the author of five chapbooks and the forthcoming book of craft essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God (2024, Noemi Press). His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, and 2021). He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He is the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Colin Cheney is a writer, poet and the author of Here Be Monsters, a National Poetry Series selection. His poems have appeared in publications such as AGNI, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Cheney has received a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is creator and co-host of the podcast Poet in Bangkok.

Gretchen Eberhart Cherington is the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart. Her memoir, Poetic License, focuses on life among her parents’ social circle of literary giants, exposing the difficult realities behind the myths. Her family spent summers on Cape Rosier.

Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, American Woman, A Person of Interest, The Foreign Student, and Trust Exercise, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn.

Kate Christensen is the author of seven novels, including The Great Man, winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award, and two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir.

Jaed Coffin is the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo/Perseus, 2008) and, most recently, Roughhouse Friday (Riverhead/Penguin, 2019). A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, his essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Nautilus, Jezebel, the Sun, and many other publications. He’s been a featured speaker at TEDx and Moth Radio Hour, as well as a guest at over twenty colleges and universities. Jaed teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Susan Conley has taught at a host of colleges and art residencies, and currently serves on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.  She is co-founder of the Telling Room, a Portland creative writing lab for young people. Landslide, Conley’s fifth critically acclaimed book, was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice upon its publication in 2021, and won similar accolades from the Today show, Vanity Fair, Good Morning America, the New York Post and other national outlets. Her previous books include the novels Elsey Come Home and Paris Was the Place as well as the memoirs The Foremost Good Fortune and Stop Here, This Is the Place. Conley has written articles and essays for the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and many other publications.

Deborah Joy Corey is the author of three award winning books, Losing Eddie, The Skating Pond, and Settling Twice. Many of her short stories have been anthologized and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including Books in Canada Best Novel Award, the David Adams Richard’s Prize for Fiction, "Elle’s Lettres" Readers Prize, and the NPR Selected Shorts Prize. She is the founder and director of Blue Angel, for which she created and edited the anthology, Breaking Bread: Writers on Food, Cravings, and Life. Born and raised in Canada, she now lives in Maine.

Russ Cox was raised by a pack of crazed hillbillies in the backwoods of Tennessee. Without much in the way of modern conveniences, like television or running water, he spent his time drawing, whittling, and throwing dirt clods at his cousins. With the bulk of his life spent in Pennsylvania, he met his wife; became a graphic designer; played in punk, alternative, and surf bands; had two kids; and started his own illustration studio, Smiling Otis Studio (named after one of their enormous cats). 

Russ creates his art using digital software, primarily Clip Studio and other digital tools. He works in traditional mediums, often with a mixture of paper, pencil, pen & ink, gouache, and watercolor. He lives in Maine with his wife and three cats.

Dave Cullen has been covering the blight of mass murders for two decades, first with his landmark 2009 book, Columbine, and this year with Parkland: Birth of a Movement, both New York Times bestsellers. For years, Columbine was the consensus definitive account of that tragedy. Parkland, by contrast, is a story of hope: the genesis of the extraordinary March for Our Lives movement. Dave was with the students from the beginning, with unparalleled access behind the scenes.

Deborah Cummins is author of the essay collection, Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine, and of three poetry collections: Until They Catch Fire, Counting the Waves, and Beyond the Reach. Her poems and essays have appeared in nine anthologies, in over sixty journals and magazines

Barbara Damrosch is the author of The Garden Primer, Theme Gardens and The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook. She has written about growing and cooking food for a number of publications, including The Washington Post and Mother Earth News. She and her husband own Four Season Farm, a vegetable market garden on Cape Rosier.

Winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, Joan Dempsey is the author of the novel, This Is How It Begins, which won the bronze Independent Publisher Book Award for literary fiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award, and Sarton Women's Book Award. This Is How It Begins was also selected by the American Library Association for the 2018 Over the Rainbow List of Literature Titles. Her writing has been published in The Adirondack Review, Alligator Juniper, Obsidian: Literature of the African Diaspora, and Plenitude Magazine, and aired on National Public Radio. She lives in Maine with her partner

Brooke Dojny is an award-winning cookbook author and food writer with more than a dozen books to her credit, including The New England Cookbook, Dishing Up Maine, Lobster!, and Chowderland. Brooke lives in Sedgwick, is currently the president of the board of trustees of Brooklin’s Friend Memorial Public Library, and can be found at her stove or frequenting farmers’ markets, farm stands, and clam shacks.

Liza Donnelly is an award-winning cartoonist and writer for The New Yorker Magazine and other publications. Author and editor of 18 books for children and adults, her most recent book is a history, Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists, and her book Women on Men was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Donnelly’s essays and political cartoons have appeared in the NY Times, Washington Post, Medium and CNN.com and others. A sought-after international public speaker; her TED talk was translated into 40 languages and viewed online over 1.4 million times, she has spoken at the United Nations, and was accepted to speak at SXSW three times. Donnelly received an honorary PhD from the University of Connecticut for her work in peace and women’s studies. The innovator/creator of digital live journalism, Donnelly has worked for CBS News and CNN covering live events and politics in digital live-drawing. She created animations for CBS News, Flatiron Books, as well as scripting a short animation for TED. Liza is based in New York.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama's favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023.

Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Their poems have won the 49th New Millennium Award for Poetry and have appeared in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, The Volta, Hinchas de Poesía, Nat, Brut, and elsewhere. They are an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College in southern Maine.

George Emlen, who lives in Blue Hill, is a conductor, composer, arranger, song-leader and music educator in Maine and Massachusetts. For 32 years he was music director of Revels, the Boston-based, national organization behind the annual Christmas Revels, a rich and joyful celebration of the winter solstice. In Maine he founded and conducted the Acadia Choral Society, while also conducting the Oratorio Chorale and the Mount Desert Summer Chorale. George has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he directed the Conservatory Camerata; Lesley University in the Creative Arts in Learning program; the College of the Atlantic, and the University of Maine. In recent years he has worked with Bobby McFerrin in the vocal improvisatory genre of Circlesinging.

Marie Moorehouse Epply is a member of the Academy of American Poets and of DownEast Writers. She serves on the steering committee of Word, Blue Hill Literary Arts Festival. An educator for her entire career, Marie has developed and taught numerous creative writing and literature courses and holds a Master of Arts from the University of Maine. Murmur and Flow is her first chapbook. She lives with her husband on the coast of Maine.

Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter, and four books of poetry. She completed her new memoir, Not As Lost As I Thought: The True Story of a Girl at Sea, about her high school adventures on a derelict square rigger. She lives in Belfast. www.elizabethgarber.com

Award-winning poet Beatrix Gates’ New & Selected Poems will be published by Thera Books in 2023. Her six poetry collections include Dos and Lambda Poetry Award finalist, In the Open. Her translations of Jesús Aguado’s poems and her poetry appear in bateau, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Gates’ hybrid work appears in Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (Michigan) and “For Orlando: Make Beautiful in Maine” in Scotland’s MAP. A long-time member of Goddard’s MFA faculty, she has taught literature and writing for over thirty years in many settings, including Colby College, NYU, CCNY, libraries in Maine and NYC and Maine Maritime Academy. She serves on the Board of The Cannery at South Penobscot and founded SIDELINES/ In Translation Series. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts with roots in Hancock, Maine and lives in Brooksville, Maine.

With a career background spanning magazine publishing, marketing and education, Emily Greenberg has been resident of midcoast Maine since 2021. Inspired by the Pine Tree State’s patchwork quilt of interesting people who value good conversation, she embarked (for the first time) on creating a podcast, The Maine Conversation. Conducting her interviews in the field, Emily introduces her listeners to Mainers ranging from goat dairy farmers and folk musicians to rock climbers and puffin researchers.

Jason Grundstrom-Whitney is a poet, writer, songwriter and musician who plays bass, harmonica, and various wind instruments. His poetry collection, Bear, Coyote, Raven (Resolute Bear Press, 2019) was reviewed in The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, and The Quoddy Times. The adopted son of Joan M. Dana, the Bear Clan Mother of the Passamaquoddy, Jason currently works as Substance Abuse Counselor/Co-occurring Specialist at Riverview Psychiatric Hospital.

Elizabeth Hand is the author of nineteen award-winning novels and five collections of short fiction and essay. Her work includes the series of psychological thrillers featuring Cass Neary, “one of noir's great anti-heroes” (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love), the historical crime novel Curious Toys, about visionary artist Henry Darger, and the recent supernatural thriller Hokuloa Road, set in Hawai'i. She divides her time between the Maine coast and London.

Samantha Haskell grew up in Blue Hill and became the owner of the community's independent bookstore, Blue Hill Books, in 2017. She is a graduate of College of the Atlantic, on the Board of the Blue Hill Heritage Trust, as well as a member of the Word Festival Steering Committee.

Adeena Karasick is an acclaimed poet/performer/cultural critic. Opera Wire writes, “Karasick’s spoken-word performance sizzles your ears with the breathy heat of her voice… hypnotic waves of text roll and break, sometimes starting as whispers before sliding into chant-like passages that culminate in a libidinous frenzy.”

Joe Hill is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, Full Throttle, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the prize-winning story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award-winning writer of a six-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work is being adapted for film and television, with NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain (Shudder), and In the Tall Grass (Netflix) slated for release in 2019 and 2020.

Jamie Hogan is an author, award-winning illustrator, and educator. She taught illustration at Maine College of Art for fifteen years and is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Jamie's picture books capture nature themes with vivid characters and magical realism. Her most recent book, Skywatcher, is a call to find the wonders of dark skies and the wilderness within us. She lives on Peaks Island with her husband and daughter.

Marty Kelley is currently a children’s author and illustrator but has, in the past, been a second grade teacher, a baker, a cartoonist, a newspaper art director, a drummer in a heavy metal band, a balloon delivery guy, an animator, and lots of other things.

He’s written and illustrated many of his own published picture books and chapter books (Ollie and Prema, Almost Everybody Farts, Pugnapped!) as well as having illustrated several books for other authors (Santa’s Underwear, I’m an Alien and I Want to Go Home).

Get the whole scoop at martykelley.com.

Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including most recently Writers & Lovers and Euphoria. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Katherine Koch, a visual artist and memoirist, has shown her paintings extensively in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. In addition to awards including residencies and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, she has worked collaboratively with writers, musicians, and theater artists. Excerpts from her forthcoming memoir about growing up among New York School poets and artists have appeared in Hanging Loose, Poetry Daily, The Saranac Review, Court Green, and Nowhere and The Best American Poetry Blog.

Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in THRUSH, Bellevue Literary Review, and American Life in Poetry. She is the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program “Poems from Here” and the host/curator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Stuart Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and on the Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.

Bob Keyes has worked as a journalist for four decades. He is a nationally recognized arts writer and storyteller with specialties in American visual arts and the contemporary culture of New England. The Isolation Artist is his debut book.

Keyes has worked for the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram since 2002. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism in recognition of his contributions to the national arts dialogue. (Photo credit Sean Alonzo Harris)

Dan Kois is a longtime writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate. He's the author of two novels, Vintage Contemporaries and the forthcoming Hampton Heights. With Isaac Butler he co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of "Angels in America", a Stonewall Honor title, and he's also the author of a memoir, How to Be a Family, and a book of music criticism, Facing Future. He lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.

The New York Times Book Review writes, “In Lehrer’s books, words take on thought’s very form, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow.”

Jonathan Lethem, novelist, essayist and short story writer, is a summer resident of Blue Hill and is best known for his 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. His most recent novel, The Arrest, is the story of what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. Sandy Duplessis, a one-time successful screenwriter, is holed up in rural Maine delivering food from his sister’s organic farm, when an old friend and nemesis, once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, shows up in an extraordinary vehicle.

Daniel Mahoney is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in journals all over the world. He is the author of Sunblind Almost Motorcrash, a book and cassette project out from Spork Press in 2015 and Quantum Entanglement, a chapbook published by Hard to Swallow in 2017. He is the editor in chief of Bateau Press.

Elizabeth Minkel is a journalist, literary critic, and editor who has written about fan culture for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, the Verge, the Millions, and more. She co-hosts a podcast on fan culture, “Fansplaining,” and co-curates a weekly fandom newsletter, “The Rec Center.”

Brook is the Director of the Brooksville Free Public Library and the host of Bookworm, a monthly radio show on WERU where she interviews authors to discuss writing, publishing, and life. When she's not reading or talking about books, she likes to bake, run, and travel to far flung places. She lives in Bucksport with her husband, Mark, and their daughter, Mabel.

Jason Moon is a senior reporter and producer on New Hampshire Public Radio's Document team. He has created documentary podcast series on topics including unsolved murders, secret lists of police officers, and overdose deaths that are prosecuted as homicides. Jason's work includes Bear Brook seasons one and two, which together have been downloaded more than 28 million times by listeners in over 150 countries. Stephen King called both seasons, “the best true crime podcasts I’ve ever heard. Brilliant, involving, hypnotic.” The New Yorker magazine called Bear Brook S1 one of the best podcasts of 2018.

Poet, translator, and essayist Jennifer Moxley’s most recent collection is For the Good of All Do Not Destroy the Birds (Flood, 2021). Author of numerous poetry books, as well as a memoir, Moxley’s poetry book The Open Secret won the 2015 William Carlos Williams award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts award. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Maine.

Todd R. Nelson is a former educator who has worked in schools in five states, including Union 93. He has lived on the Blue Hill peninsula since 1998—not far from the “headwaters” of his Colby ancestors. His writing has appeared in Maine and national publications including, Taproot, The Christian Science Monitor, Bangor Daily News, Portland Press Herald, The Ellsworth American and Maine Public Radio. His book of personal essays, Cold Spell, has just been published by Down East Books.

Emily Nussbaum is the television critic for the New Yorker. In 2016, she won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She is the author of I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through The TV Revolution.

Maria Padian has a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and a master’s degree from the University of Virginia. She is a freelance writer, essayist, and author of young adult novels, including Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best, Out of Nowhere, Wrecked, and How to Build a Heart. She lives in Brunswick, Maine, where she is at work on a new novel. Visit her online at http://www.mariapadian.com

Brooksville resident Jim Picariello is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker breaking into Hollywood from rural, coastal Maine. It's a surefire plan!

His feature scripts (The Cult of Us, Igor and Frankie) have been optioned and signed into shopping agreements, and have placed high in prestigious contests such as The Black List, The Nicholl Fellowship, Stowe Story Labs, and The Austin Film Festival. His award tally has landed him in the all-time top 1% and 2% on the screenplay ranking website Coverfly.

His short films (The Mushroom Huntress and Passive Aggressive Dads, among others) have been selected by dozens of wicked-fancy film festivals and have won, in total, fifteen top awards.

Jim even made a short for Sesame Street! (Anything you want to know about the Number Six, just ask.)

Anica Mrose Rissi, who grew up in Deer Isle and spends part of the year there now, is the author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens, including the Anna, Banana chapter books, Love, Sophia on the Moon and Nobody Knows But You.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of about twenty books, including the internationally bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. He was part of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995 and 2016, and a featured speaker at COP-26 in Glasgow, as a guest of the UK government and the UN. His work has been translated into 28 languages, and won awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”

Maria Russo is the children’s books editor of the New York Times Book Review. She has been a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, and Salon, and holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and three children.

Zeke Russell was born in Skowhegan and grew up around the zany and energetic artist's community of West Athens. He is a poet and housing advocate operating in greater Boston. His work has appeared in Wyvern Lit, Drunk In A Midnight Choir, Freezeray Poetry, Maps For Teeth and Button Poetry online. Russell was a member of the 2016 and 2017 Boston Poetry Slam teams, reaching the semi-finals of NUPIC in 2017. He has published three chapbooks and his debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Game Over Books in 2023. He lives with his partner Milo and returns home to Central Maine as often as he can.

A.O. Scott is critic at large at the New York Times Book Review, where he writes essays about literature, culture and politics. Before that, he spent 23 years as a film critic for the Times, during which time he reviewed almost 3,000 movies and saw thousands more. He is the author of Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth, and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Tim Seabrook has been working in fine art intaglio printmaking for 45 years. His early exhibits began with Images 69 at Ohio’s Baldwin-Wallace College followed by The Biennial at The Cincinnati Art Museum and juried exhibits at The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Seabrook won the George Sherman Medal Award from the Society of American Graphic Artists in New York City. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Fairfield Hall in London; Cape Split Place in Addison, Maine; and his work has been in juried shows at Maine Coast Artists in Rockport and the Barrett Art Center National Printmaking Exhibition in Poughkeepsie, NY. Seabrook was selected for “Maine Printmakers 1980-2006,” curated by Bruce Brown, and the Maine Arts Commission’s “Maine Printmakers 1980-2006,” curated by Donna McNeil. In Maine, he has exhibited at The Leighton Gallery, The Turtle Gallery and The Laughing Lion Gallery. Seabrook’s drawing and printmaking have stayed with him as a dedicated focus next to the long-term work of farming and creating 5 Star Nursery and Orchard with Leslie Cummins. 

Betsy Sholl’s ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019). She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.

Tim Seibles, Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016-2018, is the author of several poetry collections, including One Turn Around the Sun (2017), Fast Animal (2012), which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, Buffalo Head Solos (2004) and Body Moves (1988). The National Book Foundation notes, “Tim Seibles’ work is proof: the new American poet can’t just speak one language…he fuses our street corners’ quickest wit, our violent vernaculars, and our numerous tongues of longing and love.” Tim has received the Open Voice Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received a BA from Southern Methodist University and received an MFA from Vermont College in 1990. Seibles has served as a professor at Old Dominion University for over twenty years and lives in Norfolk, Virginia.

Kate Shaffer is a writer and small business owner based in Portland. She is the author of three cookbooks, which have earned accolades from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Foreword Indies Awards, and include a spot on Food & Wine’s 2011 Top 25 Cookbooks of the Year. Kate has written about food and cooking for various regional publications, including the Portland Press Herald, Creative Maine, and Edible Maine.

Kate is the founder of—and artistic director for—Ragged Coast Chocolates, an award-winning artisanal chocolate confectionery which utilizes sustainably produced chocolates and locally sourced fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

Spencer Smith is Publisher of Seapoint Books + Media, a multi award-winning publisher in Brooklin, Maine. Seapoint Books publishes mostly nonfiction books, many of them are oversize four-color books. Seapoint is distributed by National Book Network and its books are available through every bookstore and internet book site in the US and Canada. He has been an editor at Fodors Travel Guides, an editor and subsidiary rights director at David MacKay Company, a club director at Book-of-the-Month Club, president of Upstart Publishing Company, and president and publisher of the culinary magazine Northeast Flavor, where he also wrote the “Spirits” column, which as he says in his best Damon Runyon voice “that’s booze sweetheart, not Ouija boards.”

Among Mark Statman’s 10 books, the most recent are two books of poetry, Exile Home (2019) and That Train Again (2015), and the translations Never Made in America: Selected Poems from Martín Barea Mattos (2017). His writing has appeared in numerous journals and16 anthologies. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Writers Project, Statman is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies from Eugene Lang College, The New School, and lives in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca and Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, México.

Maya Stein is the Editorial Director of Toad Hall Editions, a small press located in midcoast Maine. She is also the author of two collections of creative nonfiction, two books of poetry, several writing prompt booklets, and two recent works—Grief Becomes You (2019), a collection of writings on grief with more than 60 contributors, and The Poser: 38 Portraits Reimagined (2021), featuring contemporary art recreations and essays. When she was 8 years old, Maya earned perfect scores on her spelling tests 6 weeks in a row, an accomplishment noted by her teacher in a bright pink report card. More than 40 years later, Maya is still a stickler for good spelling and grammar, and likes to play word games in her head. When she’s not attending to serial commas and split infinitives, Maya can be found riding her bicycle on back roads and perfecting her lip-sync skills.

Meghan Sterling’s publications include the collection View from a Borrowed Field (2023, winner of the Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize), and her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (2021, Terrapin Books). Her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners is forthcoming from Everybody Press in 2023. She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis (2023, Littoral Books) and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The West Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, the Mom Egg Review and others. She is Associate Poetry Editor for the Maine Review. She works as Program Director for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland, Maine.

Best known as “Paul” of the multi-platinum-selling group Peter, Paul & Mary—and for writing and performing “The Wedding Song”—Noel Paul Stookey has been a singer and songwriter since the 1960s. As an independent musician living in Blue Hill, his newest compositions address major issues from climate change to gun control.

Paul Sullivan, a Sedgwick resident, is a Grammy-winning jazz/classical composer and pianist. He has been music director, pianist, and/or conductor for multiple off-Broadway and Broadway shows and wrote the stage musical “The Last Ferryman” for Opera House Arts in Stonington. As a soloist, with his trio, and as a member of the Paul Winter Consort, he has played concert tours in most of the United States and Europe, as well as the Middle East, Central America, and Asia. His 18 CDs have sold more than 300,000 copies and have won three Indie Awards. He received the Grammy Award for his work on the CD Silver Solstice with Paul Winter.

Lori Thatcher’s penchant for short-form writing, from flash and micro-fiction to memoir is indisputable. Her six-word memoir was feature of the day on SMITH Magazine’s website, and her short stories have been published in It’s a Crime, and in My Wheels. She has led writing groups in Massachusetts and Florida, edited and published anthologies of writing by others, created websites for writers and mentored beginning writers. Lori is currently working on a chained flash fiction novel, Lulu’s Best Florida RV Resort and Trailer Park. When not navigating the angst of fictional people, she splits her time between Maine and Florida.

Cynthia Thayer was born in New York City and raised in Nova Scotia. She earned her BA and MA in British Literature from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. Since she moved to Maine in 1976, she has organically farmed, taught, spun and dyed wool, woven, and written novels, short stories, and essays. She teaches for Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and at other various venues. She founded Schoodic Arts for All in 1998. Two of her novels were published by St. Martin’s Press and one by Algonquin Books. She lives with her farming partners on Darthia Farm in Gouldsboro.

Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, SIGH, GONE: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. SIGH, GONE was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, Audible, Kirkus Reviews, and many other publications.

Meg Weston completed an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in 2008, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on creative non-fiction and photography. She is a certified AWA facilitator (Amherst Writers & Artists) and uses this methodology to lead workshops. As president of Maine Media Workshops + College, she established The Writers Harbor® program to complement the media arts curricula in photography, filmmaking, and book arts. She is the Co-Founder and Director of The Poets Corner www.thepoetscorner.org, a community-based poetry and prose platform, and co-founder and co-director of the Camden Festival of Poetry. Meg's book of poetry, Magma Intrusions was published by Kelsay Books. Her poems have been published in Hawaii Pacific Review, The Mountain Troubadour, One Art, Red Fez, as well as several anthologies including Writing the Land: Maine.

Arisa White’s most recent book Who’s Your Daddy (2021) is a memoir in verse about her trip to Guyana in search of her father, the exploration of her relationship with him, and of her childhood. “Coming in glimpses, poems felt like the perfect way to mirror memory and how it functions,” White said. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart and co-author of the middle-grade biography Biddy Mason Speaks Up, winner of the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature. Creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations centering on narratives of queer people of color. She serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press, is an advisory board member for MWPA, a Cave Canem fellow and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College.

Maya Williams (she/hers, they/them, and ey/em) is a religious queer Black Mixed Race suicide survivor constantly writing poems. In 2018 they were a finalist of the Slam Free Or Die Qualifier National Poetry Slam team and a runner up of the Individual Slam. Maya was a semi-finalist for Nimrod International Journal's Francine Ringold Award, a finalist for Best of the Net in 2019, and finalist for MWPA’s Chapbook Contest in 2019.

Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Her most recent novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy , has been published in 22 languages in 30 countries and won the 2017 Nautilus Award (Gold) and the New England Society Book Award. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys , an Oprah magazine summer-reading pick and winner of both the May Sarton Memoir Award and the 2016 Maine Literary Award. Ernie’s Ark was excerpted on NPR’s Selected Shorts and selected by several towns and cities as their One Book, One Community read.

Gigi Miller is a very bad cat who has hardly any teeth left in her head