About the event:Â
“A poem is one undivided, unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature,” Thoreau wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. “Much verse,” he said, “fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all.” Â
The WWP hosted the first Thoreau and The Miracle of Poetry event in 2021. Due to its incredible response, we’re hosting our second poetry event, on our campus in Lincoln, MA. Join us and three contemporary poets, who will read from their work, in the spirit of Thoreau. A wine and cheese reception with the poets will precede the reading.Â
Poets:
Eileen Cleary is the author of Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate, 2024), 2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021) and Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She co-edited the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus which was the featured text at the 2021 MSU Filmetry Festival. Cleary founded and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, and curates the Lily Poetry Salon. A multi pushcart nominee, Cleary has been published widely in journals and anthologies.
In spring 2021, The Word Works Press published Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry, which made Small Press Distribution’s poetry bestseller list April through September, 2021. The book was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was awarded the Silver Medal in Foreword Review’s Indies Book Award for Poetry.  Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as a chapbook in 2020 and now in its third printing; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasah Tretheway, guest editor). A native New Yorker, she lives in New Hampshire and is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University in Massachusetts.
Kylan Rice is the author of An Image Not a Book (Free Verse Editions, 2023), a collection of poems, and Incryptions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), a collection of essays. With Dan Beachy-Quick, he co-authored Primer (Free Poetry, 2023), a collection of conversations about poetics, and he co-edited Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly (UNC Press, 2023). His creative writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Image, Kenyon Review Online, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. He is the associate editor of the Missouri Review and co-editor of Thirdhand Books.
Info:
When: Tuesday, April 23, 2024 6:15-8:00pm EST.
Wine & Cheese reception will begin at 6:15pm. Reading will begin at 7:00pm
Where: The Walden Woods Project HQ, Lincoln, MA (address provided upon registration).
This event is generously sponsored by The Commons in Lincoln.
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