“Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection”

A reading with James Crews, Mary Elder Jacobsen, Megan Buchanan, Alison Prine, Patricia Fontaine, Laura Foley, and Carol Cone.

Healing the Divide urges us to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days. The anthology features poems by Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Donald Hall, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others, including our readers. These poets, from all walks of life, and from all over America, prove to us the possibility of creating in our lives what Dr. Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. 

Free and open to the public. A PoemCity 2019 Event.

Carol Cone is a former teacher and New Yorker with roots in Northern Vermont. Originally a native of Seattle, Washington, she now lives in Dorset, VT and writes with three poetry groups in the area. She has always been passionate about poetry, and her poems have been included in five anthologies, including Birchsong Vol. I and II, Border Lines, and Remember This in January.

James Crews is a regular contributor to The London Times Literary Supplement, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, and The New Republic, among other journals. The author of two collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays (Prairie Schooner Prize, 2011) and Telling My Father(Cowles Prize, 2017), he lives on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont with his husband, Brad Peacock, and teaches creative writing at SUNY-Albany.

Laura Foley is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, WTF.  The Glass Tree won the Foreword Book of the Year Award, Silver, and was a Finalist for the New Hampshire Writer’s Project, Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Inquiring Mind, Pulse Magazine, Poetry Nook, Lavender Review, The Mom Egg Review and in the British Aesthetica Magazine. Trained in chaplaincy through the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, she volunteers in hospitals and prisons, and is a certified Shri Yoga Instructor. She lives in the woody hills of Pomfret, Vermont with her wife Clara Giménez, and their two dogs.

Patricia Fontaine holds a masters degree in Counseling Psychology and Transformative Language Arts and taught Women's Studies and social justice for the past 20 years. She currently teaches classes using expressive art and writing as a refuge for those living with illness and their caregivers. Patricia survives a medley of cancers, and self-published a book of poems, Lifting My Shirt: The Cancer Poems. She lives on the edge of a big lake in Northwestern Vermont with birds, wind, and a grand collection of friends and family.

Mary Elder Jacobsen's poetry has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, GMR Online, and Poetry Daily. She is at work on a first collection of poetry, Stonechat, has poetry in the anthology Birchsong, Vol. II, The Remembered Arts Journal, and other venues, and is a recent recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency. She holds an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Teaching Fellow, and an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. She is co-curator of the annual reading series Words Out Loud, in conjunction with Art at the Kent in Calais, Vermont, where she works as an editor and lives with her family on a hill above a lake in a pocket of wild woods.

Alison Prine's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others.  Her debut collection of poems, Steel, was chosen by Jeffrey Harrison for the Cider Press Review Book Award and was published in January 2016.  Steel has been named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Alison Prine lives in Burlington, Vermont where she works as a psychotherapist.