FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington is inviting the public to a series of UMF Public Forum events on the UMF campus during the spring 2024 semester. These thematic panel discussions explore creative and academic topics while engaging perspectives from UMF faculty, students, and members of the Farmington community.
The first UMF Public Forum event will be “An Evening of Poetry,” featuring poets and faculty members Kristen Case and Jeffrey Thomson; poet, artist and designer meg willing; and students Autumn Koors Foltz and Michaela Terlizzi. This event will take place Wednesday, Jan. 24 7-8 p.m., in the Performance Space in the UMF Emery Community Arts Center. The event is free and open to the public.
Upcoming Public Forum events will include discussions on Artificial Intelligence on Feb. 7, and Changing How We Live on Earth: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sustainability on March 20.
“We are excited to invite community members to these unique and thought provoking presentations. Maine’s public universities provide a valuable window into the world around us. The mix of faculty, students, and local artists, educators and activists contribute to our Public Forum and capture the richness of the UMF and greater Farmington community,” said Joseph McDonnell, UMF president.
The UMF Public Forum is a University event series sponsored by the Office of the President. Each lecture will be followed by a discussion and a reception with light refreshments.
The Emery Community Arts Center is located on Academy Street (between Main Street and High Street) in downtown Farmington. For more information, contact Ann Bartges, director of UMF Emery Community Arts Center at [email protected] or 207-778-7461.
More information on presenters:
Kristen Case’s third book of poems, “Daphne,” is forthcoming from Tupelo press. Her book “Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar,” is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She has co-edited several collections, most recently “William James and Literary Studies,” forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and “The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau” with Oxford University Press. She is a consulting scholar for the Ken Burns documentary, Henry David Thoreau, and a two-time winner of the Maine literary award for poetry.
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, editor and the author of ten books including “Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory” and “Half/Life: New and Selected Poems” from Alice James Books, “The Belfast Notebooks,” “The Complete Poems of Catullus,” and “From the Fishouse.” He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Meg Willing is a poet, editor, interdisciplinary artist, and book designer. Growing up in Quito, Ecuador; Bangkok, Thailand; Bogotá, Colombia; and various parts of Maine and Massachusetts, she now calls Farmington home. Her creative work examines the sweet splinterings of memory, belonging, and desire through poetry, collage, cut-up, erasure, and altered books. She currently serves as Art and Design Editor for the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins.
Autumn Koors Foltz is a poet from Baltimore, Maryland. Currently they are invested in poetic sequences, body as means of exploring both fixed and relational genealogies and secrets. They are the recipient of the Fall 2023 BFA Senior Award. Their poetry can be found or is forthcoming from Ghost City Review and The Citron Review, among others.
Michaela Terlizzi is a junior Creative Writing student from the North Shore of Mass. They write both fiction and poetry dealing with Christianity, queer identity and the ways in which those subjects influence each other.
