Who will be the Next NH Poet Laureate?

SEARCH FOR NEXT N.H. POET LAUREATE UNDERWAY

Nominations Must Be Received by July 20 

Nominations are now being accepted for the next New Hampshire poet laureate. Current Poet Laureate Alice Fogel will complete her term in March 2019, after five years serving as an ambassador for New Hampshire’s poets and raising the visibility and value of poetry in the state. 

Former New Hampshire poets laureate include Walter Butts, Patricia Fargnoli, Donald Hall, Marie Harris, Cynthia Huntington, Jane Kenyon and Maxine Kumin. 

New Hampshire’s poet laureate, an honorary position, was established by the state legislature in 1967 (RSA 3-A). The Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s board of directors submits the name or names of persons to the Governor and Council; the Governor, with the advice and consent of the council, appoints the poet laureate. The N.H. State Council on the Arts is assisting the Poetry Society with the coordination of the upcoming nomination. 

In order to be considered, a nominee must be a New Hampshire resident and must have published at least one full-length book of poetry. Eligible poets may nominate themselves or be nominated by a third party. Each application must include a statement from the nominee explaining his or her vision for the role of New Hampshire poet laureate if selected. Guidelines are available at http://www.poetrysocietyofnewhampshire.org/poetlaureate.html. For more information, email info@poetrysocietyofnewhampshire.org. The deadline for submissions is July 20, 2018. 

The Walter Butts’ New Hampshire Poet Laureate Endowment Fund, created in Butts’ memory and coordinated through the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, provides New Hampshire’s poet laureate with a $500 honorarium each year to assist with travel and other costs associated with the position. New Hampshire poets laureate also receive lifetime membership in the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. 

“We thank Alice Fogel for all she did to promote poetry in the state during the past five years, and we look forward to seeing how the next poet laureate will continue her impressive work,” said Don Kimball, president, Poetry Society of New Hampshire. 

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Book of the Week (5/28/2018)

Summer Hours at the Robbers Library: A Novel by Sue Halpern (New York : Harper Perennial, 2018).

From journalist and author Sue Halpern comes a wry, observant look at contemporary life and its refugees.  Halpern’s novel is an unforgettable tale of family…the kind you come from and the kind you create.

People are drawn to libraries for all kinds of reasons. Most come for the books themselves, of course; some come to borrow companionship. For head librarian Kit, the public library in Riverton, New Hampshire, offers what she craves most: peace. Here, no one expects Kit to talk about the calamitous events that catapulted her out of what she thought was a settled, suburban life. She can simply submerge herself in her beloved books and try to forget her problems.
But that changes when fifteen-year-old, home-schooled Sunny gets arrested for shoplifting a dictionary. The judge throws the book at Sunny—literally—assigning her to do community service at the library for the summer. Bright, curious, and eager to connect with someone other than her off-the-grid hippie parents, Sunny coaxes Kit out of her self-imposed isolation. They’re joined by Rusty, a Wall Street high-flyer suddenly crashed to earth.

In this little library that has become the heart of this small town, Kit, Sunny, and Rusty are drawn to each other, and to a cast of other offbeat regulars. As they come to terms with how their lives have unraveled, they also discover how they might knit them together again and finally reclaim their stories. --Author's website

Book of the Week (5/21/2018)

Being "Pickity" by Wendy Walter (Brookline, NH: The Voice of Clay, 2018).

Author Wendy Walter's colorful and celebratory book Being "Pickity", tells the story of a well-known New Hampshire landmark and restaurant in Mason, NH, created by her parents, Judith and David Walker. It includes photographs, recipes, and magical memories of Pickity Place.

This is the story of the creation of a "Pickity" Place, a quintessential destination place in New Hampshire. David and Judith Walter, the founders, followed their hearts and shared their dream of a simple, celebratory lifestyle with all of us. Their daughter Wendy, discloses where the name "Pickity" comes from, trials and errors experienced, and what it means to be "Pickity". -- Back cover

Join Wendy Walter and her parents at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, NH, Saturday, May 26 at 2:00 pm, where they will be signing and discussing Being "Pickity".

Book of the Week (5/14/2018)

No Vacancy: The Rise, Demise, and Reprise of America’s Motels by Mark Okrant (Concord, N.H. : Plaidswede Publishing, 2013).

Loudon, NH author Mark Okrant is both a travel and tourism expert, as well as a crime novelist who is a definite asset to the Granite State.

"For almost 40 years, Mark Okrant has literally written the book on New Hampshire tourism, an experience that in the past decade he has mined to pen multiple crime novels set at historic resorts, including The Balsams, the Omni Mount Washington, Mountain View Grand, and Wentworth by the Sea. Born and raised in New London, Conn., Okrant came north in 1979 when he was hired by then Plymouth State College to create the first academic tourism program in New Hampshire."--Author's website

The disappearance and nostalgia of the motels that dotted the tourist byways of the 1950s and 1960s are recounted in the latest book by Mark Okrant, a nationally recognized expert in tourism research. No Vacancy takes a critical look back at motels and their gradual disappearance from the tourism landscape. Okrant sets the scene with entertaining interviews of motel proprietors and people who took family vacations before the interstate system dominated the tourism landscape. Alarmed by the rate at which these properties are disappearing from the tourism landscape, Okrant conducted case studies along the old Boston Post Road, Route 66, the Las Vegas Strip, and other classic roads, searching for solutions. In the end, he offers a wide-eyed, yet optimistic view of how to keep these remnants of the 1950s and 60s from turning off their lights forever. "No Vacancy" is the product of more than six decades as a motel patron, and at least half as many years of research, Okrant said. I grew up taking family vacations along the old US highways and state roads. Motels were a central part of incredible experiences with my parents and brother, and, later, with my wife and daughters. Something needs to be done to show others why they were important, and how many of them can be again. --Author's website

NH's 2018 Route 1 Read

Route One Reads is a virtual reading trip along Route One. For this year's summer road trip the Center for the Book in each state along Route One was asked to select a romance for adult readers. There are LOTS of great romance writers in New Hampshire and choosing just one of their books was too tough a job for us, so last October we asked Granite state readers to weigh in. We included a dozen romances in the survey, each by a different NH author, and asked readers to vote for their favorite.  

We heard from 226 people and 28.76% of them voted for Love Free or Die: 23 Tales of Love from the Granite State which is our Route One Read this summer. 

 "If you like romance, you’ll find all kinds of it here — sweet, funky, vampire and so on — all based in New Hampshire.  One story — about the Old Man of the Mountain — is even a little shocking, enough to  make your soft, red lips part in amazement. The book’s editor, Elaine Isaak, warns that “you’ll never think about the Old Man the same way again.” Indeed." --Barbara Coles in NH Magazine

This volume is part of the New Hampshire Pulp Fiction Series and it includes stories by 23 different Granite State writers: Michael Samuels,  Kari Lemor,  S. J. Cahill,  Robin Small,  Shana Chartier,  Judi Calhoun,  Annie Boghigian,  Jessie Salisbury,  Susan E. Kennedy, Abby Goldsmith,  Sylvia Beaupré, James Isaak,  David O'Keefe, Leah Brent,  Justine Graykin, Timothy Boudreau,  Norman Klein, B. K. Rakhra,  K. J. Montgomery,  Melva Michaelian,  Robert E. Owen, Amy Ray, and Troy Ehlers.

2019 Dublin Nominees

The NH Dublin Committee has selected its nominees for the 2019 Dublin Literary Award. These are fictional works of high literary merit published in English during 2017. After reading and discussing many excellent books, the committee selected these titles for nomination:

Swinging from heartbreaking and tragic, to humorous and lively, Lincoln in the Bardo is a unique, bizarre and captivating story. It centers around the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, and both Lincoln and Willie’s inability to move past Willie’s sudden death. This causes both to become trapped in a type of limbo; Lincoln’s in which he continually visits Willie’s crypt to hold his son’s body while grieving, and Willie, in the bardo (a Tibetan word for the "transitional" state between lives). An entire cast of characters accompanies Willie in the bardo, including many other spirits who have never been able to accept their death. The juxtaposition of historical fiction with the spirit world (that is at times more lively than the world of the living) makes this novel one that is unforgettable.

An epic story that explores the lives of generations of Koreans who emigrate to Japan during the early part of the 20th century, Pachinko addresses universal themes of family, duty and identity. 

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy braids together the stories of many people (mostly in India and Kashmir) into a lyrical novel filled with horror and love and the intimate struggles of facing each day as it comes.

Book of the Week (5/7/2018)

The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley by Jeff Deck (Charleston, S.C. : CreateSpace, 2016).

NH native Jeff Deck, co-author of the nonfiction book "The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time" demonstrates his dynamic writing abilities with his recent supernatural thriller, "The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley".

My name is Mark Huntley. All I really wanted to do was drink cheap beer and blog about my dead-end life. Then I stumbled across a secret war between two sinister alien forces. If I try to stop the war, I may get my friends and loved ones killed. If I don’t try, the human race is toast. Oh yeah, and a demonic weapon inside me is probably driving me insane.
If I’m already dead when you find this, you need to carry on the fight.

The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley is a blog mutated into a supernatural thriller. If you like the pulse-pounding terror of Stephen King and the smart, funny first-person storytelling of The Martian, you’ll love meeting Mark Huntley.-- Back cover.

3 on a Theme: Journalists

• Working at the Word Factory: The Curious Life of a Small-Town Newspaper Journalist by Eric Poor 
• Crafting a Life in Essay, Story, Poem by Donald M. Murray  
• Write All About It! Gene Sherman : the Making of Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize Reporter by Steve Sherman

Congratulations to the 2018 NH LAL Winners!

• Julianna Kajka, a fifth grader at Hampstead Middle School, wrote the letter that was selected as the 2018 Level I NH winning letter to Sara Pennypacker.
  
• Brianna Leo, a student at Milford Middle School, wrote the 2018 Level II NH winning letter to Ben Mikaelsen.
  
• Stephanie Chambers, an eleventh grader at Prospect Mountain High School (Alton), wrote the 2018 Level III NH winning letter to Stephen Chbosky. 

Info about the 2019 Letters About Literature competition will be available later this summer.