Maine Literary Award winner Agnes Bushell’s compact, charming “Verity & Perpetua” also prominently features a fictional version of Marlowe, who plays a significant role in the sprawling adventure this novel’s heroines’ experience after faking his own death
by Tobias Carroll
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Christian Barter is a poet working and writing in Bar Harbor, Maine. For the past thirty-five years, he has worked for the National Park Service at Acadia National Park as a trail crew supervisor, project manager, arborist, heavy equipment operator, dry stone mason, and specialist in park matters related to Americans with disabilities. He has published three previous collections of poetry, and has served as the Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park and as a Hodder Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. His poems have been published in Ploughshares, Tin House, New Letters, Georgia Review, The American Scholar and Downeast and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writers Almanac, and on the websites of the PBS Newshour and The Academy of American Poets. He recently released an album of original songs using text from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.”
Art Dingley was born in Farmington, Maine, and grew up in Concord Plantation, near the small town of Bingham. With sons, Zeb and Nathan, and many excellent friends, he has climbed, canoed, hiked, hunted, and fished for trout across the Pine Tree State. He currently lives in Auburn with his wife, Tami. He is a former attorney and a retired physician. Immigrants is his first novel.
Mimsy’s occasionally wry, often insightful observations on the world around her make for a memorable narrative voice. One running subplot follows Mimsy’s quest for a new house, though she also muses on the inherent paradox of ownership here: “I forgot that when you buy a house in Maine, you have to accept that it won’t really be yours until you leave it.” And she possesses no small amount of self-knowledge, including this candid reflection: “I only grew up myself about two decades ago.”
by Tobias Carroll
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Emma Krosschell lives in Brooksville, Maine, with her partner and their dog. She spends her time wandering in the woods and baking as much bread as she can. Hermitage is her first collection of poetry.
“This is the debut novel of midcoast Maine author Laurel Dodge, an imaginative writer whose brilliant combination of plot, characters and atmosphere display an engaging originality seldom seen in a first novel. This is a powerful story of remembrance, regret and redemption, balanced carefully with humor, tragedy, sadness and contentment.”
by Bill Bushnell
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Steve Langan is the author of four previous books of poetry, and his work has been
published widely in literary journals. He is the founder of the Seven Doctors
Project, an ongoing writing workshop based in Omaha which brings together
writers and health care workers. He lives in Yarmouth and on Cliff Island.
“Foerster meticulously scrutinizes seemingly small incidents and scenes, past and present, teases up their feelings and connections, and takes pleasure in shaping them in words.”
by Dana Wilde
Laurel Dodge graduated from the environmental studies department at Bowdoin College and got her master’s degree at Antioch. She has worked as a naturalist for a nature center, a land trust, and a zoo. She lives on an old farm with a big white barn in Midcoast Maine with her husband, kids, cats, and dog. The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell is her first novel.
Richard Foerster was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1949, the son of German immigrants. He holds degrees in English literature from Fordham College and the University of Virginia. His numerous honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships—as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. Since the late 1970s, his work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and Poetry. His eighth book, Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems, received the 2020 Poetry by the Sea Book Award. Foerster has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. He lives in a former Nazarene church in Eliot, Maine, with his partner, the artist Douglas Taylor.