Sydney Lea was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. His thirteenth collection of poems, Here, is now available from Four Way Books.

Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. Of his twelve previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound was one of three  finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

This event is free and open to the public. Handicapped accessible.

Nicole Homer’s first full-length collection of poems, Pecking Order, published by Write Bloody Press was a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Muzzle, The Offing, Winter Tangerine, Rattle, The Collagist and elsewhere. A The Watering Hole graduate fellow and Callaloo fellow, Nicole serves as an Editor and regular contributor at BlackNerdProblems, writing critique of media and pop culture, and as faculty at the Pink Door Writing Retreat for Women and Gender Non-conforming Writers of Color.

Nicole started slamming in 2005 at LoserSlam (NJ) and Urbana (NY). She quickly earned her spot on a team and, in 2006, started competing at the national level. She’s been everything from a wide-eyed participant to a semi-finalist to a finalist in both team and individual slams in the National Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is a full-time faculty member at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey, with an MFA from Rutgers-Newark.
See more about The Frost Place and Nicole Homer http://frostplace.org/  http://nicolehomer.com/

Jeff Friedman's seventh book, Floating Tales—a collection of prose poems, fables, and mini tales— was published Plume Editions/MadHat Press in fall 2017. He has published six previous poetry collections, Pretenders (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014); Working in Flour (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011); Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008); Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003); Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998); and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press at University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, The Antioch Review, Sentence, Poetry International, The New Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poets,and dozens of other literary magazines.  He has won numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize. Dzvinia Orlowsky's and his translation of Memorials by Polish Poet Mieczslaw Jastrun was published by Lavender Ink/Dialogos in August 2014. Friedman collaborated with Nati Zohar and Howard Schwartz on the anthology Two Gardens: Modern Hebrew Poems of the Bible, translations of poems written by Israeli poets, published by Singing Bone Press in 2016. He has taught at Keene State College for many years.

See more about Jeff Friedman
http://www.poetjefffriedman.com/

Raised in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Raphel is currently a PhD student at Harvard, where she's working on a book about crossword puzzles. Adrienne Raphel's debut full-length poetry collection, What Was It For, was published in 2017 by Rescue Press. (http://www.rescuepress.co/shop/what-was-it-for). Here is the publisher’s description of the book, "In her debut collection What Was It For, Adrienne Raphel revitalizes the topsy-turvy lyric and its evergreen sagacity. Through playground doggerel, charm, and riddle, these poems cry fair and foul to a world where pâté geese dabble in fields of lavender, crises get wallpapered over, hot air balloons stalk pleasurably, cash changes for gold, and the moon sinks into the sea to the thrum of the metronome. That world is this, our own and only, so reader, climb aboard: like a carousel, each poem loops round and round, granting dizzying vistas. All the while, these poems spill over with wonder—as in query, as in jubilee—just as a child chants why, but why, but why. By way of answer, What Was It For offers an immortal, resounding question." Poet Cathy Park Hong selected it as the winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize.

Christina Hutchins’ poetry has been published in The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, The Women’s Review of Books and other journals and anthologies, and her scholarly essays appear in volumes by Ashgate, Columbia UP, and SUNY. Literary awards include The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, National Poetry Review’s Annie Finch Prize, two Barbara Deming/Money for Women Awards, the James D. Phelan Award, and fellowships to Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts in Saratoga CA and Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.Tender the Maker won the 2015 May Swenson Award (Utah State University Press). Her other books of poetry are The Stranger Dissolves (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011), a finalist for the Lambda Poetry Award and Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Prize, and the chapbooks Radiantly We Inhabit the Air (Robin Becker Prize, 2011) and Collecting Light (Acacia Books, 1999).
 

See more about The Frost Place and Christina Hutchins

http://frostplace.org/
http://christinahutchins.net

Sydney Lea was Poet Laureate of Vermont (2011-15). His twelfth collection of poems, No Doubt the Nameless, is available from Four Way Books. His fourth collection of lyrical essays, What’s the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long, appeared in 2015.  A former Pulitzer finalist a winner of the peer-reviewed Poets’ Prize, Lea founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. Before his retirement, he had taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, Franklin College (Switzerland), Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest), and elsewhere. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and all the major U.S. literary journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundations. His thirteenth book of poems, Here, will appear in 2018. He and his successor as Vermont state poet Chard deNiord have recently published Roads Taken, an anthology of contemporary Vermont poetry.

See more about Sydney Lea HERE.

Kerrin McCadden is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, inaugural winner of the 2015 Vermont Book Award, as well as the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize, chosen by David St John. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award. Her work has also received support from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Arts Endowment Fund. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Verse Daily, and in such journals as American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Collagist, Green Mountains Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, PANK, Poet Lore, and Rattle. A graduate of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Montpelier High School. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.
See more about Kerrin McCadden
http://kerrinmccadden.com/

Tim Mayo holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars. His first full length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities (Mayapple Press, 2009) was a semi-finalist for the 2009 Brittingham and Pollock Awards and a finalist for 2009 May Swenson Award. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation, was published in 2016 by Phoenicia Publishing (Montreal) and was twice a finalist for the Quercus Review Poetry Book Award, twice a semi-finalist for the Word Works Press Washington Prize and, recently, a finalist for the Montaigne Medal. Mayo has also been the recipient of two Vermont Artists & Writers Fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he was a founding organizer and a former member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
 See more about Tim Mayo
https://www.tim-mayo.net/
 

Julia Shipley and Florence Fogelin

Julia Shipley is an independent journalist and author of The Academy of Hay, winner of the 2014 Julia Shipley is an independent journalist and author of The Academy of Hay, winner of the 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize and Adam's Mark, named a Best Book of 2014 by the The Boston Globe. Winner of the 2006 Ralph Nading Hill Award and two-time recipient of  Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Community Fund grants, she was also awarded The Frost Place's Grace Paley Poetry Fellowship, as well as fellowships to The Center for Book Arts and The Studios at Key West.

Visit Julia Shipley's Website

Florence Fogelin's "Once It Stops" was featured Oct. 3, 2014, on Poetry Daily, following fall publication in The Florida Review. Press 53 Open Awards Anthology 2013 included three of her poems, one of which was among three published on the Women's Voices for Change website. Her chapbook, Facing the Light (Redgreene Press, 2001), was said by John Engels to be "elegant work, direct, unaffected, eloquent and passionate."
See More About Florence Fogelin