7 PM start for all events
Friday, April 4 – Open Mic, White River Craft Center
Thursday, April 10 – VT Poet Laureate Bianca Stone – Esther Mesh Room, Chandler Center for the Arts
Saturday, April 19 – Local poets Danny Dover and Ina Anderson – Kimball Library
Saturday, April 26 – Silloway Maple Farmer Poets – Taylor Mardis Katz, an herb farmer; Katie Spring, a vegetable and flower farmer; and Greg Bernhardt, a goat farmer and cheesemaker
Bios
Bianca Stone is the author of five books, including the poetry collections, What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award and The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018) and the forthcoming The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. She co-founded and is creative director for the poetry-based nonprofit Ruth Stone House, where she teaches and hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast. She is currently serving as the 2024-2029 Vermont Poet Laureate.
Ina Anderson was born and raised in Cumbria in the northwest of England. She has now lived in Vermont for many years. Her first work was in editing scientific journals, including Icarus: International Journal of Solar System Science, with editor Carl Sagan. She later took to teaching, spending over twenty years at the Community College of Vermont as a faculty member and student advisor. Ina’s poems have appeared in many publications, including Birchsong, This Place I Know, When All This Is Over, The Mountain Troubadour, and Literary North. Several of her poems appeared in the Pie Poets anthologies, Perhaps It Was the Pie, 2014, and The Party Cabinet, 2023. Her first collection, Journey Into Space, published in 2017 by Antrim House, was nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her newest collection, Sky Furniture, was published by Kelsay Books in 2024.
Danny Dover is a retired piano technician living in Bethel, Vermont. Since 1995 his poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and in two previously published collections: Tasting Precious Metal and Kindness Soup, Thankful Tea. His third book, Flamingo Nation (Onion River Press), was released last year. In the words of James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Kindness Will Save the World: “Every poem [in Flamingo Nation]…. is precise yet effortless….Danny Dover cares deeply about his readers, crafting poems that help to make our ‘hardened world’ a better, more compassionate place…… I’m in love with the light-filled kindness that lives at the center of this life-giving and necessary new book.”
Greg Bernhardt is the author of Goats & Those Who Live by Them and the novel When Everything Was Possible. Greg is also a professional painter and an artisanal cheesemaker and farmer at Blue Ledge Farm, which he and his wife, Hannah Sessions, established in Addison County, Vermont in 2000. It is this livelihood, making cheese, making hay, animal husbandry, and working alongside his wife, which provides the subject matter he reflects upon in both painting and writing.
Katie Spring is a writer, mother, and co-creator of Good Heart Farmstead in Worcester, Vermont. She believes that creativity is as essential as food, and her writing is a testament to the ways that creativity nourishes us. Katie’s newsletter, Art & Soil, explores how we grow a world of connection, belonging, and really good food. Find her online at katiespring.substack.com.
Taylor Mardis Katz is a poet, herb farmer, and shopkeeper living in Chelsea, VT. A native New Yorker, she has lived in Vermont since 2012, when she and her partner started Free Verse Farm. Taylor’s poems have been published in a variety of literary journals and nontraditional periodicals, recited on radio stations across the state, featured on the podcast Brave Little State, and shown up in all sorts of other wild and whimsical places. While still in the process of finding a home for her first full-length manuscript, she is working to publish a letterpress chapbook with a local printmaker this winter.
