April 2024 Participants
Keynote Author Andre Dubus III
Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in June 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, is forthcoming in March 2024.
Mr. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Featured Author Ilyon Woo
Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023,” also named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Boston, Chicago Public Library, and Oprah Daily.
Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times, and she has received support for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions.
She has traveled the country to speak at bookstores, museums, schools, and book festivals, and she has been featured on such programs as NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University, where she first came upon the story of William and Ellen Craft.
Adam White
Adam White’s first novel, The Midcoast, was a national bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a CrimeReads Best Book of the Year. In addition to writing fiction, White has been nominated for an Emmy as co-producer of Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare and served as story consultant on the Oscar-nominated documentary Cartel Land. He is an Executive Producer and writer on the TV adaptation of The Midcoast, currently in development at Hulu, 20th Century Studios, and The Littlefield Company (Fargo, The Mandmaid’s Tale). A 2001 graduate of Phillips Exeter, White has an MFA from Columbia University and now lives in Boston, where he teaches writing and coaches lacrosse. In 2022, USA Lacrosse honored White with the Gerry Carroll Award, given to one high school coach nationwide for exemplary service on and off the field.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. He is the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear and If It Sounds Like A Quack.... His writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont and is a member of the Order of the Occult Hand.
Michael Brosnan
Michael Brosnan is a poet and writer based in Exeter, New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry, Emu Blis, Bums Lie, Blue-ism, a finalist for the Wandering Aengus Book Award, was published in early 2024 by Broadstone Books. He is the author of two previous collections — The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018) and Adrift (2023). His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and has won awards from various arts organizations. In 2023, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is also the author of Against the Current, a book on inner-city education that served as the basis for an award-winning documentary, Accelerating America. He writes often on issues related to education. More at www.michaelabrosnan.com.
Kristen Lindquist
Kristen Lindquist is an award-winning poet and freelance writer whose work has appeared in such venues as Down East Magazine, Bangor Metro, and Bangor Daily News, as well as many literary journals and anthologies. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. An avid birder and naturalist, Kristen wrote a monthly nature column for 16 years; her nature-writing has won two Maine Press Association Awards. Her poetry collection Transportation was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award, and Garrison Keillor read three poems from the book on The Writer’s Almanac.Her most recent books are Tourists in the Known World: New & Selected Poems (2017) and Island (2023), a haiku collection. She has twice won the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award; her haibun chapbook What We Tell Each Other is forthcoming in 2024. She currently serves as the Regional Coordinator for New England for the Haiku Society of America and maintains a daily haiku blog, Book of Days, at her website kristenlindquist.com. She lives in her hometown of Camden, Maine with her husband, crime novelist Paul Doiron.
Chelsea Woodard
Chelsea Woodard’s third collection, At the Lepidopterist’s House, won the 2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was released from Southern Indiana Review Press in October, 2023. She is also the author of the collections Solitary Bee(Measure Press, 2016) and Vellum (Able Muse Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, River Styx, and other journals, and is included in the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). She is the recipient of the Peter Heinegg Literary Award from Union College, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Katherine Howe
Katherine Howe is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, The House of Velvet and Glass, and Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with Anderson Cooper, as well as several young adult novels. She served as editor of The Penguin Book of Witches and her fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. Descended from three women who were tried for witchcraft in Salem, she lives and sails with her family in New England.
Rachel Slade
Rachel is the acclaimed author of Making It In America and Into the Raging Sea, a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. She spent a decade in the city magazine trenches at Boston—first as the design editor, ultimately as executive editor. Her editing and writing have won national awards in civic journalism, reporting, criticism, and reader service. She has been a lecturer in political science and journalism at Tufts University. She splits her time between Brookline, Massachusetts, and Rockport, Maine.
Caitlin Shetterly
Caitlin Shetterly is the author of Modified, Made for You and Me, and the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce. Pete and Alice in Maine is her first novel. Her work has been featured in the The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Orion, Elle, Self, and on Oprah.com, as well as This American Life and various other public radio shows. She is an editor at large for Frenchly, a French arts and culture online news magazine, for which she writes the popular Le Weekend newsletter. A Maine native, she graduated with Honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband in her home state. Caitlin enjoys running in the woods and swimming in the ocean. She is passionately committed to helping preserve, in every way she can, the peace of wild things.
Amanda Gokee
Amanda Gokee covers New Hampshire for The Boston Globe. She focuses on topics including the environment, health care, inequity, education, and housing, and co-writes the “Globe N.H. | Morning Report” newsletter. Before joining the Globe in 2023, she worked as a reporter for the New Hampshire Bulletin and VTDigger. She grew up in Vermont, is a graduate of Harvard University, and earned a master’s degree from Dartmouth College.
Wickie Rowland
From New Castle, NH, Wickie Rowland is the author and illustrator of three books: NEMA award winner Good Morning, Strawbery Banke, Good Morning, Piscataqua, and Mom’s Choice gold medal award winner Finding Forget-Me-Nots: the Story of a Mindful Elephant. She is also the illustrator of the newly published Emma and the Big Blue Summer by Sharon Stamas. Wickie’s routes to publication have been varied, but her favorite so far is going the hybrid self-publisher route, and she calls it the best education she could ever have gotten. Wickie is happy to share her experiences with new or aspiring authors, as there is a lot to learn about getting a book into publication, and having it be the best that it can be. Her work has been licensed as greeting cards, museum exhibits, and local marketing. To see her work, please visit her website at www.wickierowland.com where you can sign up for her newsletter to stay “in the know”, and join her on Instagram st www.instagram.com/wickierowlandillustration.
Marie Miller
Music therapist Marie Miller envisioned turning songs she wrote into “singable” picture books to use in her practice. Her first book—“Where Do You Sleep?”—invites young children to read, sing along or listen to the included MP3 recording. While learning how bears, fox and other animals sleep, they build speech, language and literacy skills. Marie operates Rhythm and Strings Music Therapy, a private practice that provides music therapy services at special purpose schools in Maine and New Hampshire. Passionate about providing rhythm-based resources, Marie has written hundreds of songs that complement movement and visuals in her work with young children.
The first obstacle to creating her book--the cost of an illustrator—led to Kickstarter, where Marie raised enough to get the book illustrations ready for a graphic artist and printer.
Marie brought specific ideas for each page of “Where Do You Sleep?” and worked closely with her illustrator and graphic designer. She searched for visuals of the animals she wanted depicted. Each animal name is a single syllable, and the name is repeated three times on its page, to develop beginning literacy.
It is important to Marie that her first book is the product of women-owned businesses and printed by a eco-friendly publisher. “Where Do You Sleep?” is illustrated by Erika Parker Rogers and designed and formatted by Elise Weeks, owner of Pixels & Pulp, a local design firm. It is printed by an FSC certified (Forest Stewardship Council) printing company that practices Green Printing and EarthCare initiatives. Marie Miller lives in Berwick, Maine.
Matt Tavares
Matt Tavares is the author-illustrator of the New York Times best-selling picture book Dasher, as well as Red and Lulu and several sports biographies, including Becoming Babe Ruth and Growing Up Pedro. He is also the illustrator of Twenty-One Steps: Guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by Jeff Gottesfeld, The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup, 'Twas The Night Before Christmas, and Over the River and Through the Wood, among many other picture books. Matt Tavares lives in Maine.
Suzanne Slade
Sibert Honor author Suzanne Slade has written more than 150 children's books. As a mechanical engineer who worked on rockets, many of her titles are about space and women in STEM. Some recent titles include The Universe and You, Mars Is: Stark Slopes, Silvery Snow, and Startling Surprises, June Almeida, Virus Detective!, The Woman Who Discovered the First Human Coronavirus, and A Computer Called Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Helped Put America on the Moon (NSTA Best STEM Book). Her title, Astronaut Annie, soared to the ISS and was read by astronaut Anne McClain for Story Time From Space.
Matt Miller
Matt W Miller is the author of Tender the River, finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award, and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, and Club Icarus, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner. He was a winner of Nimrod International's Pablo Neruda Prize, the Poetry by The Sea Sonnet Sequence Contest, the River Styx Micro-fiction Prize, the Iron Horse Review's Trifecta Poetry Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he teaches and coaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in coastal New Hampshire.