Frost Farm’s Hyla Brook Reading Series Features Melissa Balmain

DERRY, NH, July 26, 2016 – The Robert Frost Farm’s 2016 Hyla Brook Reading Series features Melissa Balmain, humorist, poet and teacher, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, 6:30-8:30pm. Hyla Brook Poet Patti O’Neil will also read. 

The series, held in the Frost Farm located at 122 Rockingham Rd (Rt 28), is free and open to the public. An Open Mic follows the readings and all audience members are invited to share their work. 

Balmain, of Rochester, NY, is the Editor of Light, America's premier journal of comic verse. She teaches humor writing, poetry writing, and journalism at the University of Rochester. Though she has received the Able Muse Book Award and twice been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, some of her favorite prizes are Abe Lincoln bobbleheads, salt and pepper shakers that look like outhouses, and other classy items she has won in the Style Invitational, The Washington Post’s weekly humor contest. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Arts Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, Poetry Daily, and The Spectator (UK); her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. Her latest poetry collection is Walking In on People (Able Muse Press). 

Joining Balmain is Patti O’Neil of Derry. O’Neil has been a Hyla Brook Poet for two years. Her poems have appeared in publications including Still Crazy and Rattle. She is a middle school teacher in Derry, where she and her husband have raised their five children. 

The final reading of the 2016 season takes place on Thursday, September 8, and features Johnny Longfellow along with Hyla Brook Poet Marti Noel. 

Through September, the Hyla Brook Poets’ monthly writing workshop meets on the third Saturday of the month at 10am at its summer home at the Frost Farm. 

For further information, email hylabrookpoets@gmail.com, or visit www.frostfarmpoetry.org.