Featuring James Crews with Beck Anson, Tatiana Bruno, Harmony Edosomwan, and Holly Painter.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the following sponsors:

Celebrate National Poetry Month with an evening of poetry readings and a conversation with Bethany Breitland, winner of the Sundog Poetry Book Award. Breitland will read from her acclaimed debut collection Fire Index, and will be joined on stage with the book award’s final judge Shanta Lee and publisher Dede Cummings for an intimate conversation on craft and the healing power of poetry. Additional readings from former Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord, Shanta Lee, James Crews, Meg Reynolds, Dede Cummings, Ross Thurber, and Megan Buchanan. 

Co-presented by Green Writers Press and Sundog Poetry.

A Virtual Book Launch for Lucas Farrell's the blue-collar sun

Sunday, May 23rd, 7:00 pm ET - Register up until one hour before the event here.

Lucas Farrell will read from his manuscript, the blue-collar sun, winner of the 2020 Sundog Poetry Center's 1st or 2nd Poetry Book Award.

Neil Shepard will introduce the poet and host the evening.

Free and open to the public.

Donations to support Sundog Poetry's ongoing work to promote poetry for all Vermonters are greatly appreciated. Donate here.

Tuesday, April 20, 7:00 pm, ET

EMERGING VERMONT VOICES READING

Poets Shanta Lee Gander, Desmond Peeples, and Jad Yassine read from their work in this program co-sponsored by the Sundog Poetry Center and the Poetry Society of Vermont. Shanta Lee Gander is the winner of Diode Editions full-length book contest for her debut poetry compilation, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, Desmond Peeples is the founding editor of Mount Island, a literary magazine for rural LGBTQ+ and POC voices, and Jad Yassine’s writing has appeared in Francis House, Bellevue Literary Review, and Portrait of New England.

This reading will be held over Zoom and is free and open to the public. To register in advance, visit www.kellogghubbard.org/poemcity

Shanta Lee Gander is the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts. Shanta Lee gives lectures on the life of Lucy Terry Prince as a member of the Vermont Humanities Council Speakers and is the 2020 gubernatorial appointee to their board of directors. Shanta Lee also offers virtual creativepreneurship workshops for writers and other artists connecting them to strategies around project planning, and other topics, as a part of her business, Obsidian Arts, L3C. Visit Shantaleegander.com for more information.

Desmond Peeples' writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Isele, Past-Ten, Goreyesque, and elsewhere, and they write regularly for the Vermont Arts Council. They hold degrees from Goddard College and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Desmond was born in Brattleboro and now lives in the Northeast Kingdom. Find out more at desmondpeeples.com.

Jad Yassine wishes he had a better singing voice. Born and raised in Lebanon, he moved to Vermont in 2016 to pursue Creative Writing studies at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, and moved to White River Junction in 2018. Apart from writing, he is your friendly neighborhood medical courier at Green Mountain Messenger.

Through our partnership with Winooski Library we are sponsoring a Youth Poetry Writing Workshop. Participants will be introduced to Bianca Stone’s poetry and have the opportunity to create and share work in a supportive and welcoming space. Aspiring youth writers and poets, please come!

This is FREE for Winooksi Youth ages 12 to 18 years old.

Friday, April 16th - 3:00 to 4:30 pm ET

Register here on the Winooski Library website.

Call or email, Library Director, Nate Eddy: 802-655-6424 neddy@winooskivt.gov

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House & Octopus Books, 2014), and The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Baffler and Poetry Magazine. Her newest collection, What is Otherwise Infinite, will be out on winter 2022. She lives in Vermont where she is co-founder and Program Director at The Ruth Stone House, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting poetry and letterpress book arts. To learn more about Bianca Stone, please visit her website here: https://poetrycomics.org/

A Virtual reading for Lucas Farrell's the blue-collar sun

Thursday, April 8th, 7:00 pm ET

Lucas Farrell will read from his manuscript, the blue-collar sun, winner of the 2020 Sundog Poetry Center's 1st or 2nd Poetry Book Award.

Chard deNiord will introduce the poet and host the evening.

REGISTRATION via NEXT STAGE here.

Donations to support Sundog Poetry's ongoing work to promote poetry for all Vermonters are greatly appreciated. Donate here.

A thoughtfully compiled poetry anthology accompanied by striking works of art, You Don’t Have to Be Everything is filled with diverse poets of varied identities grappling with questions of gender, sexuality, harassment, and pain while also celebrating beauty, risk, and making mistakes. Grouped by emotional experiences, such as loneliness, longing, attitude, rage, belonging, these 68 poems ring with diversity, self-discovery and self-acceptance.

Spanning the spectrum of identities You Don’t Have To Be Everything includes a range of voices from award winner Elizabeth Acevedo to Instagram heroes Kate Baer and Nikita Gill to giants of the genres Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver to National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman and many more. The collection allows readers to let go of shame and perfectionism, urging them to accept their own contradictions and embrace the complexity and fullness of who they are—and who they are becoming

This event is free and open to the public, but donations are greatly appreciated and they support Sundog Poetry Center's continued mission to encourage poetry for all Vermonters. A private Zoom link will be provide on the day of. Please register here.

Diana Whitney writes across genres in Vermont with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Her first book, Wanting It, became an indie bestseller and won the Rubery Book Award in poetry. For years she was the poetry critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she featured women authors and LGBTQ voices in her column. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, the Washington Post, the Kenyon Review, and many more. A feminist activist in her hometown and beyond, Diana advocates for survivors of sexual violence and fights for the rights of women and girls. Find out more at www.diana-whitney.com

Pre-order YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE EVERYTHING here.

Also reading will be two contributors to the anthology:

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, M.J. Fievre moved to the United States in 2002. At nineteen years-old, she signed her first book contract with Hachette-Deschamps, in Haiti, for the publication of a Young Adult book titled La Statuette Maléfique. Since then, M.J. has authored nine books in French that are widely read in Europe and the French Antilles. In 2015, Beating Windward Press published her memoir, A Sky the Color of Chaos, about her childhood in Haiti during the brutal regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. M.J. is also the author of Happy, Okay? Poems about Anxiety, Depression, Hope, and Survival (Books & Books Press, 2019) and Badass Black Girl: Questions, Quotes, and Affirmations for Teens (Mango Publishing, 2020). She helps others write their way through trauma, build community and create social change. https://www.badassblackgirl.com

Joy Ladin is the Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University and the first (and still only) openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. She has published nine books of poetry; a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger. Her writing is available at joyladin.wordpress.com.

Two beloved Vermont poets and long-time friends, Sydney Lea and Cleopatra Mathis, will each give a short poetry reading and discussion. A short Q&A session will follow. This event is free and open to the public, but donations are greatly appreciated and they support Sundog Poetry Center's continued mission to encourage poetry for all Vermonters. Please register online here. A private Zoom link will be provide on the day of.

Sydney Lea, former Pulitzer finalist, winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and founder of New England Review is author of 21 books. His latest is a mock-epic graphic poem, The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, produced in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka. His thirteenth collection of poems, Here, appeared in late 2019. Lea is also author of the novel A Place in Mind, four collections of personal essays, and a critical volume, A Hundred Himalayas.

Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, and has lived in New England since 1980. She is the author of eight books of poems; the most recent is After the Body: Poems New and Selected, published by Sarabande Books in 2020.  Her many awards and prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. The founder of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College, where she taught from 1982-2016, she lives with her family in East Thetford, Vermont.