Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum

On Thursday evening, October 6th at 7:00 p.m. LPL will be hosting Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum for an evening of poetry in Callahan Hall. He will be reading a selection of poems including new work and reflecting on the role of poetry in our lives and in Maine.

Stuart Kestenbaum is currently the Interim President at the Maine College of Art. He was the director of the Haystack, a crafts school in Deer Isle, Maine, where he established innovative programs that combined craft, writing, and new technologies, for 27 years. Prior to that he worked at the Maine Arts Commission and the Children’s Museum of Maine. He remains active in the field of craft as an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council and a recipient of the Distinguished Educator’s Award from the James Renwick Alliance. In March of this year, he was named Maine’s fifth poet laureate, a five-year post created by Maine’s Legislature in 1995.

He is the author of four collections of poems: Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions), and Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), as well as a collection of essays entitled The View From Here (Brynmorgen Press). He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines, including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Northeast Corridor and on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Former United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser said, “Stuart Kestenbaum writes the kind of poems I love to read, heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given a life. No hidden agendas here, no theories to espouse, nothing but life, pure life, set down with craft and love.”

This program is free and open to the public. For more information contact LPL’s Adult & Teen Services Desk at 513-3135 or LPLReference@Gmail.com