Poets Kearney, Potter to read in Language Arts Live event

Dawn Potter, Maine poet.

Two award-winning New England poets read from their work at Bates at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

The Language Arts Live series of literary readings presents Dawn Potter, author of a prize-winning memoir and three poetry collections, and Meg Kearney, whose collection Home by Now won the 2010 Winship/PEN New England Award.

Open to the public at no cost, Language Arts Live readings are sponsored by the English department, Humanities Fund, Learning Associates Program and John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-6256 or 207-784-0416, or rfarnswo@bates.edu.

A resident of Harmony, Maine, Potter is the associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, an annual summer gathering held at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, N.H. Her most recent poetry collection is How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2009), and CavanKerry will publish her third collection, Same Old Story, in 2014.

Potter’s memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), chronicles her strange project of copying out all of Milton’s Paradise Lost while living in the Maine woods. Tracing Paradise won the 2010 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Potter’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sewanee Review, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner and other journals. She plays fiddle in the band String Field Theory.

Poet and teen-fiction writer Meg Kearney.

The title poem of Kearney’s collection Home by Now appears in Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems: American Places (Viking Penguin, 2011). Kearney (pronounced CAR-nee) previously published the poetry collection An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions Ltd., 2001).

Kearney is also the author of the 2005 teen novel, written in verse and journal entries, The Secret of Me (Persea, 2012). The sequel, The Girl in the Mirror, is due out this month.

Her story “Chalk” appears in Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short Short Stories (Persea, 2011). Kearney’s first picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2013 and will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis.

Kearney is founding director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Previously she was associate director of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards) in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University.

Early in her career, Kearney organized educational programs and conducted power plant tours for a gas and electric company in upstate New York. She is a former poetry editor of Echoes, a quarterly literary journal. A native New Yorker, Kearney resides in New Hampshire with her three-legged black Lab, Trouper.

Bates has long welcomed internationally recognized poets, including William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks, to read and work with students. Since the establishment of the creative writing concentration within the English major in 1991, the department has hosted more than 75 talented poets and writers.