Adults

Join John Gillespie in celebrating Poetry Month. Each Tuesday, various Maine poets will read and discuss their works. Bring your own lunch. Coffee and tea provided. This week's poet is Annaliese Jakimides.

Annaliese Jakimides' prose and poetry have been published in many journals and magazines, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Utne Reader, Decor Maine, and GQ, as well as in anthologies such as Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family; This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women; Rivers of Ink: Literary Reflections on the Penobscot; The Essential Hip Mama, About Face, and A Dangerous New World. Cited in national competitions, most recently as a finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work has also been broadcast on NPR and MPBN. She has been a finalist twice in both poetry and nonfiction for the Maine Literary Awards. Along with Troy Casa, she is the cofounder of the Belfast Poetry Festival in Belfast, Maine.

Join John Gillespie in celebrating Poetry Month. Various Maine poets will read and discuss their works. Bring your own lunch. Coffee and tea provided. This week's poets are Jefferson Navicky and Kristin Case.

Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics at Naropa University. He is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), a Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021) won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Jefferson’s work has received several acknowledgments and awards, including an American Rescue Plan/Maine Project Grant, a Maine Arts Commission grant, and three Maine Literary Awards. His plays have been produced throughout New England. Jefferson is proud to be a member of Maine’s literary arts community and is active in several volunteer boards, committees, and community projects. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

Kristen Case is the author of three poetry collections: Little Arias (New Issues, 2015), Principles of Economics (Switchback Books, 2018), and Daphne (Tupelo Press, 2025).She is the recipient of a Macdowell fellowship and a two-time winner of the Maine literary award in poetry. Her work has also appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Pleiades, The St. Ann’s Review, Brooklyn Review, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, Wave Composition, Eleven Eleven, Tinderbox, Wildness, Rust + Moth, BOAAT, The Portland Press Herald, Harvard Review, Matchbook Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly. Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, Café Review, How to Love the World: Poems o Gratitude and Hope, Maine Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She has published essays at LitHub, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and with Essay Press. 

VA S.A.V.E. Training is a free, course that will help you act with care and compassion if you come across a Veteran who is in crisis or having thoughts of suicide. All are welcome to attend. No registration required.

Join us for this celebration of our photographers, as we announce the winners in each category: Color, Black & White, and this year’s challenge theme, “Triumph". Refreshments will be served. 

Coinciding with the Joy of the Lens is the Friends' Photo Lottery. Current Friends members, as well as anyone who joins the Friends by 5 p.m. on April 25, will be entered into the Friends’ Photo Lottery for a chance to win Lilac Breasted Rollover Takeoff  by Linda Cullivan.

Sarah V. Schweig is the author of the chapbook S. Her second book, The Ocean in the Next Room, won the Jake Adam York Prize. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Black WarriorReview, BOMB, Boston Review, HTML Giant, the Iowa Review, Tin House, VerseDaily, the Volta, West Branch, the Winter Anthology, and elsewhere.

Join John Gillespie in celebrating Poetry Month. John will share about his poetry journey. He will read 10 poems and share some poetry books from his recent podcast.  He may host a Poetry Walk

Join Bowdoin Professor Patty Jones and Bowdoin Senior Issie Gale as they discuss the newly planted Pollinator Park at the Topsham Solid Waste Facility and the importance of landscaping for pollinators with native plants. This talk is co-sponsored by the Topsham Conservation Commission.

Dr. Tomah will give a talk on the doctrine that legitimized the colonization of indigenous lands and its profound effect on native peoples, from the perspective of those who have suffered under it. He is a language keeper, director and curator of the Sipayik Museum, and teacher of the Passamaquoddy language and culture. 

About the author:  

A language keeper, Tomah is the director and curator of the Sipayik Museum. A teacher of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, he has served on the tribal council. In 2024 he received an honorary doctorate degree from Colby College. 

Dwayne Tomah is currently working with the Library of Congress on translating the Passamaquoddy wax cylinders. They are the first recordings in the world of Native languages and were recorded in 1890 by Jesse Fewkes, who borrowed the device from inventor Thomas Edison. Tomah has also been involved in repatriation and the Land Back movement to share historical truth regarding the Doctrine of Discovery from the Indigenous perspective.

Cohosted by Forest Circles and Topsham Public Library. For more information, contact Regina Strongheart  rstrongheart@gmail.com

This event DOES NOT take place at the library..

It will be at:

Social Goose, 94 Maine Street, Brunswick, ME

 For more information, contact John Gillespie at jgillespie@beyondtbl.com

Kate Kearns is the author of You Are Ruining My Loneliness (Littoral Books, 2023), and a chapbook called How to Love an Introvert (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Maine Women Magazine, the Maine Sunday Telegram “Deep Waters” section, and on Maine Public Radio’s “Poems from Here”. Her poems have also been published in Salamander, Peregrine, Northern New England Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. Kate was a finalist for the 2024 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and the 2024 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA from Lesley University and BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, The Literary Review, FIELD, Poetry Northwest and Orion. His prose has appeared in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Publishers Weekly, Slice, and other places. He also served as the City of Portland’s fifth Poet Laureate, ending a three-year term in 2018. With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, He has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and live in Portland with his family. 

Join us for a poetry reading from Lauren Saxon. Lauren Saxon is a queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and being chronically online. Lauren's work is featured in Barrelhouse, Empty Mirror, Across the Margin, Homology Lit, and more. Her debut chapbook, "You're My Favorite" won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Book of Poetry, and is out now with Thirty West Publishing. 

Show your love for the Earth by decorating a cookie. VolunTeens have put together cookie kits to decorate for Earth Day. The enormous heart cookies will be decorated with an earth and a heart. Must Sign up at the front desk or call 725-1727. The first twenty people to fill the spots are in. All ages welcome.

Join us for a reading from Katherine Hagopian Berry

Katherine Hagopian Berry has appeared in the Café Review, SWWIM, and Feral among other places. Her first collection, Mast Year, was published in 2020 and she has two collections, Landtrust (Nature Culture Publishing) and Orbit (Toad Hall Editions) forthcoming in 2022. She is a poetry reader for the Maine Review.

Mike Bove is the author of four books of poetry: Soundtrack to Your Next Panic Attack (Aldrich Press, 2024), EYE (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), House Museum (Moon Pie Press, 2021), and Big Little City (Moon Pie Press, 2018). His work has appeared in the U.S., U.K., and Canada in publications including Rattle, Chestnut Review, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, and the anthologies Wait: Poems From The Pandemic and Writing The Land. In 2021, he was winner of the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest and a finalist for a Maine Literary Award in 2023. In 2024, he served as writer-in-residence at Acadia National Park. He is Editor of Hole in the Head Review, a biannual poetry journal.

Samaa Abdurraqib, PhD: Samaa's poetry can be found in Cider Press Review, decembermagazine, and Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.She’s the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and IndigenousPoets Write the Northeast (2023). She has been supported byresidencies at Hewnoaks, Hillholm, and Monson Arts. Her chapbook, Towardsa Retreat will be published by Diode Editions in 2025. Samaa is acertified Maine Master Naturalist and is the Executive Director of MaineHumanities Council.

Join John Gillespie in celebrating Poetry Month. Various Maine poets will read and discuss their works.
 
Cammy Thomas is an American poet. Her first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.^[1] A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, appeared in 2021. All are published by Four Way Books. Two of her poems, under the title Far Past War, were set to music by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas.^[2] The premiere of this choral work was performed by the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in March, 2022. 

Robert Carr is a Pushcart and Best of The Net nominated poet whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Cortland Review, Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner, Maine Review, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Sonora Review, Tar River Poetry, and other publications. He is a 2022 Monson Arts resident; co-editor for the 2019 Ghana Literary Group anthology, Bodies and Scars; and a member of Writing the Land, an initiative pairing poets and land trusts in order to promote preservation.