Eight poets & eight visual artists participate in the 7th Annual Belfast Poetry Festival October 14 and 15, 2011 in downtown Belfast, Maine.
One of the only community-based, non-academic poetry festivals in the country, the event features established, professionally recognized poets and artists from throughout Maine along with emerging poets to create a lively mix.
A unique feature of the Festival all six years has been the Gallery Walk, in which the audience moves among four downtown galleries to view the collaborative exhibits by artist/poet teams and hear the accompanying poetry.
3rd Annual Maine Postmark Poetry Contest
The Belfast Poetry Festival is pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. Everyone in Maine—residents, citizens and visitors— are invited to submit entries of up to two (2) pages of poetry (one poem per page, please, so either two short poems or one longer poem); each entry must be accompanied by a $5 reading fee (proceeds will be used to support the contest and the festival). Poets may submit more than one entry, but each additional entry is an additional $5. All proceeds will benefit the Belfast Poetry Festival.
The Belfast Poetry Festival Committee will screen entries and forward finalists to an outside judge, a poet of national reputation, who will choose first, second and third place winners. Winners will be invited to read the winning poems and be honored at the 7th Annual Belfast Poetry Festival, October 14 and 15, 2011; winners will also be announced and published in the Maine press.
Submissions are welcome from now until September 1, 2011; only submissions received with a Maine postmark dated September 1 or earlier will be accepted and read.
Download 2011 contest details »First Friday October 7, 5–8pm: Poetry and Art Gallery Openings
Friday, Oct 14, 7pm: Gammons Room of the Belfast Free Library
An Evening with Maine Poet Laureate Wes McNair.
Also — Winner of the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest and Belfast Poet Laureate, Jacob Fricke with saxophonist Alan Crichton.
Saturday, Oct 15: Art & Poetry Gallery Walk
10am – 12pm: Belfast Free Library
Writing Workshop with Arielle Greenberg
1–2:15pm: Gallery Walk Begins at Aarhus
Poet Richard Miles with Artist Ingrid Ellison
Megan Grumbling with Dan Beckman
2:15–4pm: Belfast Free Library
Poet Carey Salerno with Artist Sally Faulkner
Poet Christian Barter with Artist Russell Kahn
Poet Carolyn Locke with Artist Kathy Pollard
Poet Robert Shetterly with Artist Judy Taylor
4:30–7pm: Waterfall Arts
Poet Elisabeth Benjamin with Artist Anna Strickland
Poet Molly McDonald with Artist Maryjean Viano Crowe
Poet Ira Sadoff with Artist Barbara Andrus
5:30–6:30: Reception
6:30–7pm: Closing “Call & Response” Reading (open to all)
The Belfast Poetry Festival is co-sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.
The Belfast Poetry Festival began in 2004 under the auspices of Festivo, a small steering committee that later disbanded. It has been run by the current Belfast Poet Laureate (appointed by the Belfast City Council) and a Waldo County steering committee of volunteers each October since then, and is one of the few community–based, non-academic literary festivals in the country. All events are free or low cost to the public.
Activities have included poetry readings, workshops, art exhibits, evening performances, poetry contests, and book displays by Maine bookstores, publishers, and authors. A highlight of the festival is a curated show of collaborative projects between poets and visual and/or performing artists in Belfast galleries and other venues. These 9 artist/poet teams are chosen by the Poet Laureate and Steering Committee and consists of professionally recognized Maine artists and poets. The teams’ projects are displayed for the month of October in local galleries and coordinated with Belfast’s First Friday Art Walks. During the Festival weekend, audience members move from gallery to gallery to see the artwork and hear the poetry read live. Projects have included sculpture, musical performance, dance, painting, printmaking and broadsides, book arts, and installations.
2011 Maine Postmark Contest Judge: Emily Wilson.
2011 Steering Committee:
Linda Buckmaster
Debbie Mitchell
Arielle Greenberg
Brenda Harrington
Carl Little
Elizabeth Garber
Ellen Goldsmith
Tom Maycock
Jacob Fricke
Details
Most events except the dinner are free with donations encouraged.
Donations can be made out to the City of Belfast and mailed to:
Linda Buckmaster
Poet Laureate
12 Huntress Ave.
Belfast ME 04915
For more information, keep checking this site for regular updates, or contact us.
Complete 2011 festival schedule coming soon. Please check back.
Christian Barter’s first book, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Literary Review, North American Review, Georgia Review, and The American Scholar and has been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. He was a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University in ’08– ’09 and was recently a resident fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he is a crew leader for the trail crew at Acadia National Park and an editor at The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Elisabeth Benjamin lives and farms alongside Cobscook Bay in Washington County. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, Thermos, New Orleans Review, Black Warrior Review and Parcel, and her chapbook, The Houses, was published in 2009 by The Catenary Press. In 2010 she received a Martin Dibner Fellowship from the Maine Community Foundation.
Megan Grumbling’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, and other
journals, and was awarded a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, from the Poetry Foundation, and a Robert
Frost Award for Poetry. She is author and printer of the chapbook To and From Deepening, which has
this year been reissued in a second edition by the Robert Frost Foundation. She teaches writing at
the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, serves as reviews editor for the
poetry and arts journal The Café Review, and is theater critic for the Portland Phoenix.
Carolyn Locke lives in Troy, Maine. A teacher at Mount View High School for many years and a
graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College, she has done
readings in various venues such as the Live Poets Society, Unity College, Belfast Public Library,
Borders Book Store, WERU Radio, the Camden Conference Community Program in Cushing, and the Bangor
Public Library. She has participated in two study tours to China, a Fulbright Hays Seminar in
Morocco, and two Fulbright projects in Japan.
Her work has appeared in The Bangor Daily News, Bangor Metro, Off the Coast, Echoes, The Cafe Review, Puckerbrush Review, and Potato Eyes Magazine and has twice been recognized in the MWPA Poetry Competition. Her first collection of poems, Always This Falling, was published by Maine Authors Publishing and Cooperative in May of 2010.
Molly McDonald teaches English at Washington County Community College. She lives in Eastport.
Wesley McNair is the author of nine volumes of poetry and two books of nonfiction, and he has edited five anthologies of
Maine writing, including three that feature Maine poetry. Few authors are as well versed in the history of Maine poetry or
the work of Maine’s contemporary poets as Wesley McNair. The recipient of numerous awards in poetry, McNair has held grants
from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations, two Rockefeller fellowships, and two grants in creative writing from the National
Endowment for the Arts. He recently read his poems at the Library of Congress and was selected for a United States Artists
Fellowship as one of “America’s finest living artists.” McNair’s latest book is the newly released
volume Lovers of the Lost, New & Selected Poems.
Richard Miles lived in southern Vermont as a child, graduated the University of Vermont and received
an MFA from the Iowa Poetry Workshop. He co–founded the Aspen Writer’s conference, taught at The
University of Arizona and went on to publish The Evener, a draft horse magazine. He combines poetry
with stonework and sculpture in stone, has shown locally as well as at The Guggenheim Museum in New
York City. His book, Boat of Two Shores, appeared in 2007 with UMM Press, and Child & Other Poems, a
chapbook, in 2011. His new manuscript, Refusing Capture, awaits a publisher.
Ira Sadoff is the author of seven collections of poetry (most recently Barter), a novel, O. Henry
prize-winning short stories, and The Ira Sadoff Reader. A new collection of poems, True Faith, will
be published next year by BOA. His new critical book, History Matters, on the relationship between
poetry and culture, was published by the University of Iowa.
He is the recipient of Fellowship from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Former poetry editor of The Antioch Review and co–founder of The Seneca Review, he has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the MFA programs at the University of Virginia, Warren Wilson, and currently teaches at Colby College and the MFA program at Drew University.
Carey Salerno is a poet and publisher. She is the executive director of Alice James Books, a nationally acclaimed, cooperative poetry press. Her first book, Shelter, won a 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award and was positively reviewed in Library Journal, The Bark magazine, Pleiades, and other venues. Her poems have appeared in various journals online and in print in journals such as Rattle and Natural Bridge. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Maine at Farmington and is a faculty member of the Longfellow Mountain Young Writers Workshop.
Barbara Andruss has recently been working mostly in Maine, between Belfast and Swans Island. She is
always looking for and collecting materials. For her most recent sculpture, she has collected wild
quartz rocks and selected ocean–gone wood, and then words, stories and images about water and water
animals. She works with the tree parts, milkweed silk, crochet-related forms, book–making, fabric
over branches, felting and knitting.
Maryjean Viano Crowe uses materials in unique ways to create mixed media installations that often
incorporate clothing as art, large–scale photographic assemblages, light box shrines, artist books,
and mixed media paintings. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally. Included in
numerous private and museum collections, including the Polaroid International Collection and the
Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, Crowe received a 1995 National Endowment for the Arts in
Photography, and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship in 1987, a grant for which she was
also a three time Finalist.
Among the museums where her work has been exhibited are the DeCordova, Danforth and Fuller Museums regionally. Nationally Viano Crowe’s work has been seen at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Florida, the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum in LaGrange, Georgia, Artemesia Gallery in Chicago and Light Impressions in San Francisco.
Ingrid Ellison was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and here earliest memories of Maine were floating
in a little sloop amidst the fog and rocks of the coastline. Ingrid’s studies led her to a BS from
Skidmore College and an MFA from American University. Additionally, she spent a year learning
printmaking at Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy. Her work built in layers, is informed by elements of
nature, both from the surrounding environment and from the microscopic world. Since moving to Maine
in 2007, Ingrid’s exhibits include the CMCA’s 2008 Biennial and First Traces Exhibit, and the 2010
I-95 Triennial at University of Maine, Bangor. Ingrid lives in Camden with her husband and two
children.
Sally Faulkner has lived in Belfast for the last twenty years, in Maine for over thirty. She
completed an MFA in book arts and printmaking at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA in
2010, concentrating in letterpress printing. She has a BA in human ecology from College of the
Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME and an AS in Plant and Soil Technology from the University of Maine, Orono.
She currently makes books of varying structures as a way to enhance the imaginative pleasures of the narrative. She is inspired by the beauty of the unbuilt, natural world, and lives in view of the ocean.
Russell Kahn lives the motto, “Think globally, act locally” through his art. He has been an art
educator in public schools for the past 20 years and shows his own art in local venues, however
inspiration for ideas and media comes from all over the globe. His father is from Capetown, South
Africa, his mother is from Tel Aviv, Israel, and his stepmother is from Innsbruk, Austria. Prior to
settling in Maine , he lived in New York , South Africa , Boston , Tucson , and on the Navajo
Reservation. All of these places and cultures have contributed to how he sees the world.
His work spans different genres and styles such as silkscreening, pastels, ink and clay. The silkscreens are created with a lot of graphic humor as his arsenal. He explores many different ways of printing (paper stencil, crayon/glue method, and photographic printing). The large drawings are done in a calligraphy manner that may be similar but not a duplicate to the original sketch. The clay pieces are thrown on the potter’s wheel and carved into using a variety of tools, and the firing process is done in a wood fired kiln or using the Raku process. The final products are related to ceremonial vessels or architecture from around the world.
Kathy Pollard is an artist, carver, basket maker, and writer. She has lived in Maine since 1981. Her
educational background is in Wildlife Biology, Nursing, Technical Writing, and Research. As a child
she learned Native American bead work and how to work with leather; later she wove her first basket
from hand hewn white oak splints and other native materials. She produces functional splint baskets,
coil–stitch construction using sweet grass that she gathers from the salt marshes Downeast.
Her basket series include “We Are Still Dancing! Maine Indian Petroglyph” series, “Extinction is Forever!” series, and “Native American Legends” series. The first features interpretive reproductions of Maine Indian petroglyphs in celebration of the rich artistic and cultural legacy created and left by Maine’s First Nations; pictures pecked into smooth stone beside the waters of Machias Bay and the Kennebec River at Embden, thousands of years ago. The second features species of animals whose continued existence on Turtle Island, Mother Earth, is jeopardized by the choices humanity collectively is making. And the Legends series presents Native American legends and stories, including the origin of fire among the Cherokee, and the Tlinglet legend of how light first came into the world.
Anna Strickland is an installation artist who teaches in the Photography Department at the Rhode
Island School of Design. She is most passionate about, and an expert in, antique photographic
processes. Her installation work is exhibited both nationally and internationally. Currently she is
in a group exhibition in Houston, TX called “Evolutionaries: Art and Healing” and her installation
“Given” will be shown at the Tilt Gallery, Phoenix, AZ in 2012. Her most recent international
exhibit was “The Ladder Series” at Galerie Spéos, Paris, France in 2010.
Her work can be found in private and public collections both in the USA and Europe. She has an MFA
from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has received grants
from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Pollack Krasner Foundation. She has been a fellow at the
MacDowell Colony and had a residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado.
For several years she has been working on an installation called “Mind the Gap” which deals with
humankind’s relationship with the natural world so when she moved her studio from NYC to Waterfall
Arts in 2007 it seemed like a perfect fit.
Judy Taylor, born in Nebraska, Judy grew up in the midwest and moved to the east coast and New York
City in 1985 to study at the New York Academy of Figurative Art where she received her Masters
Certificate in Advanced Studies. She then continued her studies in New York under masters such as
Harvey Dinnerstein at the National Academy of Design in New York prior to studying in Europe. In
1995 she moved to Mount Desert Island in Maine and operates her studio and gallery in Seal Cove.
Her work is in many public and private collections. In 2008, she was awarded the commission to
paint the history of Maine labor for the Department of Labor in Augusta.
Robert Shetterly is a self–taught artist. A collection of his drawings and etchings, Speaking Fire at Stones, was published in 1993 with poems by William Carpenter. He is well known for his series of 70 painted etchings in response to William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation. For the past eight years he has been painting the series of portraits (numbering now over 145 ) called “Americans Who Tell the Truth.” The show has been traveling around the country for over seven years. In 2005 Dutton published a book of the portraits by the same name. In 2006 the book won the top award of the International Reading Association for Intermediate non–fiction. Since 1990, Shetterly has been the President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), and producer of the UMVA’s Maine Masters Project, an on–going series of video documentaries about Maine artists.
Downtown Belfast Maine (google maps)
1 | Åarhus Gallery
50 Main St., Belfast, Maine
207-338-0001
website
2 | Belfast Free Library
106 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.3884
website
256 High Street, Belfast, Maine
207.338.2222
website
» Printable map with addresses
Belfast Maine is a wonderfully easy town to walk around in. Based on the map above, the Festival waking distances are less than a mile and there is plenty of free parking. There are many restaurants and shops all within striking distance of the Festival venues. So we encourage you to come and join us this Autum weekend.
City of Belfast
Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance — 2011 Co-sponsor
Special thanks to:
Åarhus Gallery
Belfast Free Library
Waterfall Arts Center
Support for the Belfast Poetry Festival is greatly appreciated. In appreciation we list supporters on our website, along with a link (if available) to their website. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor for the 2011 festival please contact Linda Buckmaster for more info.
Love poetry, art & music? Want to be a part of the 2011 weekend activities? Why not volunteer? It’s a great way to contribute to a unique occasion and meet people.
Contact us on how you would like to help.
For questions, suggestions, or general info please feel free to contact us.
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- For general festival info: jacob [at] belfastpoetry.com
- For participant questions: linda [at] belfastpoetry.com
- To contact the Webmaster: catlin.barnes [at] gmail.com