The power of community supporting the art of poetry is ever present at Word’s annual Poets Alive! event. It’s an ideal opportunity to spend time with a variety of poetic voices.

Free event

Kathleen Ellis has published five collections of poetry, most recently Narrow River to the North, Outer-Body Travel, and Body of Evidence, which won the 2022 Grayson Books poetry contest. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and Maine Arts Commision, her poetry manuscript Dear Darwin was set to music and released in a Grammy-nominated CD.  

Hailed as “A hearty weed in the garden of American poetry,” Dave Morrison's poems have been featured on Writer’s Almanac, Take Heart, and Poems from Here. Morrison has published 17 books of poetry including Clubland and Cancer Poems. We Are Here and It Is Now is his most recent collection. He spent years playing in rock bands in Boston and New York City.

Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor and was Portland’s seventh poet laureate. In 2024, eir poetry collection What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? won a Garden Party Collective chapbook prize, and ey received the Maine Humanities Council’s Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize.