The Annual Chestertown Spring Poetry Festival will be virtual at 7 pm April 24 and showcase two special guests; the 2012 Obama Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco and NPR’s Fresh Air luminary, Maureen Corrigan.
Local poets Meredith Davies Hadaway, James Allen Hall, and Robert Earl Price will also join the reading.
Richard Blanco’s collections of poetry include City of a Hundred Fires (1998), which won the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize; Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005), winner of the PEN/American Beyond Margins Award; Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012), winner of the Thom Gunn Award, the Maine Literary Award, and the Paterson Prize; One Today (2013); Boston Strong (2013); and How to Love a Country (2019).
Maureen Corrigan is an American author, scholar, and literary critic. She is the book critic on the NPR radio program Fresh Air and writes for the “Book World” section of The Washington Post. In 2014, she wrote So We Read On, a book on the origins and power of The Great Gatsby.
James Hall is a Professor of English/Creative Writing and Director of the Literary House at Washington College. His books include Now You’re the Enemy which won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Press’s Essay Award, published in April 2017, and winner of the 2018 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award for Nonfiction Prose.
Robert Earl Price is an American playwright and poet. He is a recipient of the American Film Institute’s William Wyler award for screenwriting and is the author of four books of poetry, and has had eleven plays produced in American regional theaters and abroad in Berlin and Johannesburg. His play Blind Tom Wiggens (2002), based on the true story of a blind savant pianist born as a slave to a Confederate general and attaining a national reputation, was hailed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the “most important Atlanta premiere of the new century” He recently received the 2021 Meredith Foundation award for his latest book, Blood Flow.
Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of three collections of poetry, At The Narrows (2015), The River is a Reason (2011), and Fishing Secrets of the Dead (2005). Her collection, At The Narrows, won the 2015 Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing. She has read her work in both literary venues and nature centers across the United States and in Ireland and received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, plus multiple Pushcart nominations.
For more information and to register, go here.
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