Writing to Keep the Dead Alive

Motherhood and Modern Jewish Identity in Poetry

A Generative Workshop and Reading with Meghan Sterling

Thursday, February 15 2024

Workshop: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Poetry reading with Stuart Kestenbaum and Yael Grunseit: 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

$25/ticket 

How does our cultural identity influence our lives? Our art? Our ability to parent? How do we preserve the memory of our ancestors while living modern lives? In this workshop, poet Meghan Sterling will work with participants to craft poems drawing from their heritage, their cultural identity and their questions about what it all means. Learn about how poetry can help us claim and honor ours and our families’ pasts without brushing the hardships under the rug. Bring a family photo (or two) and/or an object that brings up a memory of your heritage.

After the workshop, Sterling will read from her recent collections, View from a Borrowed Field (Paul Nemser Poetry Prize Winner, Lily Poetry Review, 2023), Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions, 2023) and Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press, 2023). Acclaimed local poets Stuart Kestenbaum and Yawl Grunseit will also read from their latest collections.

About Meghan Sterling:

Meghan Sterling lives in Gardiner, Maine with her family. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The West Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, the Mom Egg Review and many others. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press. She was Featured Poet in Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 issue, a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, published by Littoral Books. Her debut full-length poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Eric Offer Grand Prize Award. Her second full-length collection, View from a Borrowed Field, won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize and will come out in March 2023. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will come out in April 2023. Her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) will come out summer 2023. When she isn’t writing poetry, being a mom or running in the snow, she works as Program Director for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

Tickets