Lowry’s Lodge Open Reading

Sunday, March 10, 2024
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
(note: Clocks Spring Forward on this day)

Come early to view the wonderful art exhibits.
The Museum is open for guests from Noon until 4:00

Spring forward with celebrated Maine poets and Lowry’s Lodge founders Anna Wrobel and Jim Donnelly at this quarterly event! We will begin the evening with a reading by Featured Poet Pam Burr Smith, followed by an Open Poetry Hour. Time will be allotted based on the number of open sign-ups. Some snacks, some beverages, some time for each other.

Bio: Pam Burr Smith has published short stories, essays, articles and poems in many journals, including, Georgia Review, Kansas Quarterly, Slow Dancer, and Cafe Review. She has published two poetry books, Heaven Jumping Woman, Moon Pie Press, 2011, and Near Stars, 2019, Blackberry Books, one chapbook, She Speaks, 2019 and one book on Narrative Therapy, Living Conversations, Fresh Press, 2001. She was awarded an Honorable Mention by Mary Oliver in the 1994 MWPA Poetry Chapbook Contest. In 2021, she won the Finest Poem Prize at the Plunkett Poetry Festival at UMA. After a career as a therapist, she is returning to her earlier career of painting. She has been writing poetry all her life, and she lives in Brunswick, Maine.

Bio: Anna Wrobel is an American historian, teacher, poet, Holocaust Studies educator and daughter of Polish Jewish refugees, a rescue partisan mother and Soviet soldier father. Her poetry and essays appear in Cafe Review, Lilith, Off the Coast and Jewish Currents. Anna has two poetry collections, Marengo Street (2012) and The Arrangement of Things (2018). Her work appeared in University of Maine’s Holocaust Human Rights Center’s art and poetry exhibit, Dilemma of Memory, and she’s presented for the Puffin Foundation on Jewish resistance. Anna is consultant to the Jewish Partisans Educational Foundation (JPEF) and an Advanced Studies Lerner Fellow of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR). Anna’s poetry and history teaching have been featured at the Maine Jewish Museum, Colby College, Thomas College, UMaine-Augusta, Jewish Community Alliance, USM’s OLLI classes and OLLI Sage Lecture series. Poems from her manuscript Sparrow Feathers: Second Generation/First Person are used by teachers in several U.S. states, Poland, Germany and Israel-Palestine. Anna co-hosted the long-running poetry series, Lowry’s Lodge, with musician/writer Jim Donnelly. Life experiences include theater; artisanal craft; Galilee kibbutz farming (daughter Corinna Shulamit born); Maine mountain homesteading (son Barak Azriel born); construction site foreman; refugee advocate; long-time president of a local teachers’ union; single mom.

Bio: Jim Donnelly was born in Brooklyn and raised in North Carolina, Georgia, and Queens, New York. He began his working life at thirteen at a canning plant, an after-school job where he often worked well into the night. Since then he has variously been a waiter, foot messenger, factory worker, cab driver, trucker, forklift operator, retail manager, shipping clerk – and working musician. Largely self-educated, he worked as a journalist for a New York arts weekly, penning a social research column called “Media Misinformation.” He currently drives a bus for a retirement community. He not only “summers” in Maine, but falls, winters, and springs there as well, living in Westbrook, a neighbor to Moon Pie Press.

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