NHBF Author: Elaine Sexton

Elaine Sexton is a poet, critic, and educator. Her latest work, The Post Office: An Opera in Poems, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Spruce Peak Arts, Stowe, Vermont in 2026. The libretto was also published in book form in tandem with the opera. Her five previous books of poetry include: Site Specific: New & Selected Poems (2025), Drive (2022), Prospect/Refuge (2015), Causeway (2015), and Sleuth (2003). She is a 2026 NYSCA (New York State Council for the Arts) grantee for her work on the opera, as well as a 2025 Mellon Foundation funded Opera Fusion: New Works residency, and a 2023
Hermitage Artist Retreat residency. 

Her poems, art reviews, book reviews, and works in visual art have appeared in journals and anthologies, textbooks and websites including American Poetry Review, Art in America, Five Points, Poetry, Poetry International, Ploughshares, O! the Oprah Magazine, Poetry Daily, and the 50th Anniversary issues of Provincetown Arts. She teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute, and has been guest faculty at New York University and in the graduate writing program at City College (CUNY). She is regularly invited to teach poetry, bookmaking, and art writing at arts and writing programs and centers in the U.S. and abroad, among them Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Arts Workshop International (Assisi). She teaches private workshops in her studio and online.

This author is scheduled to appear at the NH Book Festival which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026.