3 on a Theme: Fire & Ice

The Fire in the Glass (The London Charismatics) by Jacquelyn Benson  

Ice Lands by Carol Westberg

Iggy Who Breathes Fire by Carrie Kruck

3 on a Theme: Monadnock Stories

Monadnock Originals: Colorful Characters from New Hampshire’s Quiet Corner by Alan F. Rumrill

Written in Granite: Monadnock Poems & Stories by Sebastian Lockwood

Murder on Mount Monadnock by J. S. Winter

Book of the Week (7/27/2026)

Photosynthesis & Respiration: Poems by Christopher Clauss (Silver Bow Publishing, 2022)

The thread running through this collection of poems is relationship, but many take a scientific perspective. In most ecological systems the process of photosynthesis is responsible for the creation of food from inorganic carbon dioxide and water, absorbing energy from the sun to fuel life on our planet. Respiration in living things does just the opposite, breaking down that food into its original components and releasing energy to power every life process in which we engage. The two processes function in tandem, intertwining in an elegant dance, depending on one another to keep us all alive, much like partners in a relationship. One could describe this collection as love poems about science or science poems about love. Either way, they bridge the gap between two marvelous phenomena, neither of which we will ever fully appreciate, and about which we still have so much to learn. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Christopher Clauss is a father, poet, and middle school science teacher from Chesterfield, New Hampshire. He has represented his home state six times at the National Poetry Slam as a member of the Slam Free or Die poetry slam team. Christopher's work explores the bliss and turmoil of faith, teaching, parenting, marriage, and community in rural New England, with a scientific flair. His poems have been published in New York Quarterly, Plants and Poetry Journal, Sylvia, FreezeRay, and Bureau of Complaint. You will find him in the middle of the Pacific Ocean exploring the seafloor or wading into tidepools in the North Atlantic.

Join Christopher and the Slam Free or Die Competition Team at Gibson's Bookstore on Wed., August 19, 2026 from 4:30-6:00pm for an afternoon of poetry!

Arthur Sze to serve 2nd term as U.S. Poet Laureate

This National Poetry Month, the Library of Congress has appointed Arthur Sze to serve a second term as the nation’s 25^th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2026-2027! Congratulations Arthur! 

   

 Click here for more details.

2026 Poetry Out Loud semi-finals

Mid-February may bring Valentine hearts and cupids to mind for most people, but for two dozen New Hampshire high schoolers, it’s time to show their love of poetry – and skill at reciting it – at the statewide Poetry Out Loud semifinals. 

The N.H. State Council on the Arts, which administers the program in the Granite State, today announced that two semi-finals will take place in the coming weeks: at Plymouth State University Silver Center for the Arts on Feb. 17 (snow date: Feb. 18) and at the Derry Opera House on Feb. 19 (snow date: Feb. 20). Each event begins at 6 p.m.
 
Since 2005, high school students from across the country have participated in Poetry Out Loud, a poetry recitation competition designed to improve public speaking skills, help build confidence, and teach literary history. This year, approximately 3,000 students from New Hampshire high schools and high school groups participated.

In recognition of America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, the 2025-2026 Poetry Out Loud program focuses on poems that celebrate American history and culture. All of the poems for this year’s competition are in the public domain. 

Contestants’ recitations are evaluated by trained judges who evaluate physical presence, voice and articulation, evidence of understanding, interpretation, accuracy and overall performance.

Poetry Out Loud school champions advance to semi-finals, then top semi-final finishers move on to the New Hampshire state championship, scheduled to take place in Representatives Hall at the State House on Friday, March 6 (snow date: March 9) beginning at 5 p.m.

New Hampshire’s state champion will have the opportunity to join with champions from other states and territories at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals, scheduled to take place April 27-29, 2026 in Washington, D.C., coinciding with National Poetry Month.

Managed at the national level by the National Endowment for the Arts and in New Hampshire by the State Council on the Arts, Poetry Out Loud provides free lesson plans and other educational materials to teachers and organizers, curates the online poem anthology, funds and produces the national championship and provides monetary awards to champions at the state and national level. 
                                
In addition to funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, additional support in New Hampshire comes from Brightspot Consultants; the Currier Museum of Art; Derry Public Arts Committee; the Frost Place; New Hampshire Writers’ Project; North Country Education Services; the Putnam Foundation, a donor-advised fund of the N.H. Charitable Foundation and Slam Free or Die.

To learn more about 2026 New Hampshire Poetry Out Loud, visit nharts.dncr.nh.gov/programs/poetry-out-loud. For additional information, contact Allison Hawkins, New Hampshire State Council on the Arts at 603-271-0791, allison.hawkins@dncr.nh.gov. -- NH Department of Natural & Cultural Resources press release

Book of the Week (2/9/2026)

How to Be Good by David Banach (Bee Monk Press, 2025)

“What is goodness?” David Banach asks in his compelling new collection. The poems of How to Be Good journey through the political, the historical, and the personal, examining the theatrical masculinity of the town dump, nicknaming the inflatable figure in front of car dealerships the “Sisyphus of advertising,” and blasting anger like a broken jar of salsa. 

Banach recalls for us “all the difficulties of/loving in this wind-swept world where kindness/is lighter than air” through work that considers profanity and philosophy, theology and gender. How to Be Good rings with Whitman and Blake and declares empathy “an ache in places I never knew/I had places.” Banach is a rare poet of the pure heart, and his poems soothe like a balm for a contemporary age where heaven might require a two-factor authentication for entrance as a way of keeping out those who have ignored sunsets or kissed without passion. --Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire

About the author:

David Banach is a philosopher and a poet, though often not in that order. He has taught for many years at Saint Anselm College and lives in Goffstown, NH, where he tends chickens, keeps bees, and watches for lessons in the sky. He has published over 70 poems in various journals, and is editor of Touchstone, the journal of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. He is a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize nominee, and is a past president of the Northern New England Philosophical Association. 

Join David at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, NH on Sunday, April 12, 2026 at 11 am where he will read from & discuss his newest book of poetry.

3 on a Theme: Houses

A House of Her Own: Women Writers of New England and Their Homes by Beth Luey

Tales of a Not So Tiny House by Chloe Barcelou & Brandon Batchelder

A Doubtful House by Alice B. Fogel 

Book of the Week (11/17/2025)

Identifying the Pathogen by Jennifer Militello (Tupelo Press, 2026)

A hybrid collection blending historical research and contemporary essays to consider the nature of oppressive marriage and gender inequity.

Composed as a lab notebook recording various surgeries, autopsies, and experiments, Identifying the Pathogen tells the story of a scientist on an obsessive quest to document an ailment that resists classification. The book considers the body in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, woven through with the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini—an eighteenth-century Italian anatomist and artist who struggled to support a husband suffering from depression—as well as several essays detailing accounts of a ruptured appendix, a splintered cello, and an ill-fated rock climbing excursion.-- Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), and the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four previous books of poetry. Militello has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

3 on a Theme: Seasons

The Last Confession of Autumn Casterly by Meredith Tate

Winter by Patricia Fargnoli

Peregrine Spring: A Master Falconer's Extraordinary Life with Birds of Prey by Nancy Cowan 

Arthur Sze is the Nation's 25th U.S. Poet Laureate

The Library of Congress recently announced the appointment of Arthur Sze as the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2025-2026.

The winner of the Library’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Sze will begin his laureateship with a reading of his work on Thursday, Oct. 9, in the Library’s historic Coolidge Auditorium.

During his term as Poet Laureate, Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, plans to have a special focus on translating poetry originally written in other languages.

Visit the Library of Congress' website for a press release about Arthur Sze here and for a short interview with Arthur Sze, here.

NHBF Author: Matt Forrest Esenwine

As a former radio broadcaster, Matt Forrest Esenwine spent a good part of his life writing and producing commercials, comedy bits, and news stories. He also wrote poetry, which was published in various national journals and anthologies including the Donald Hall tribute Except for Love (Encircle, 2019). Little did Matt know all this short-form writing would lead to his debut picture book, Flashlight Night (Astra Young Readers, 2017), which received numerous positive reviews including a Kirkus star, was selected as one of New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids 2017, and even showed up on Encyclopedia Brittanica’s list of “11 Children’s Books That Inspire Imagination.”

Matt now has nearly a dozen books to his credit including I Am Today (POW! Kids Books, 2022), recipient of the 2023 NH State Literary Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature, and Once Upon Another Time (Beaming Books, 2021), co-authored with Charles Ghigna (aka, Father Goose®), a book that ALA’s Booklist called “a necessary addition to picture book collections.”

Meanwhile, his children’s poetry can be found in anthologies like The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry (National Geographic Children’s Books, 2015) and Construction People (Wordsong, 2020), as well as his own debut anthology, A Universe of Rainbows (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2025), which has gained positive reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal. 

Matt lives in New Hampshire with his wife, kids, and more pets than he has fingers, so don’t ask him to count.  

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 3-4, 2025. 

NHBF Author: Rhonda DeChambeau

Rhonda DeChambeau (she/her) is a writer and poet who grew up in a small New England town. After graduating with a degree in English from Harvard University, she earned her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A lover of libraries, Rhonda served as the 2022-2023 Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence, where she wrote Top Heavy, her debut young adult novel. Rhonda’s second novel, a middle grade novel-in-verse, is scheduled to release in the Fall of 2026. When she’s not writing, Rhonda teaches creative writing at GrubStreet, a nonprofit writing center in Boston. Rhonda lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two almost-adult children, who are her biggest fans.

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 3-4, 2025. 

NHBF Author: Julia Thacker

Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was chosen for the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by the renowned poet Paul Muldoon. Also a finalist in The National Poetry Series, the book was published in the US and the UK by The Waywiser Press in 2025. 

In her enthusiastic endorsement, Joan Houlihan, author of It Isn’t a Ghost if it Doesn’t Live in Your Chest, says, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings. What a rich and thrilling collection.” These poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry International and other journals. Twice a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Julia has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute. She has taught creative writing at Tufts University, the Radcliffe Seminars and as poet-in-residence in public schools throughout Massachusetts. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

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 3-4, 2025. 

NHBF Author: G C Waldrop

G.C. Waldrep is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Bucknell University and director of Bucknell’s Creative
Writing Program. 

Waldrep’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, Harper’s, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and many other journals in the USA and abroad, as well as in Best American Poetry anthology series and the second edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. With Ilya Kaminsky he co-edited Homage to Paul Celan (Marick, 2011), and with Joshua Corey he co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012).

Waldrep was born in 1968 in South Boston, Virginia, near the North Carolina border. He graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in American history (1990) and then received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from Duke University (1992, 1996). His revised dissertation, Southern Workers and the Search for Community: Spartanburg County, S.C., won the inaugural Richard L. Wentworth Prize from the University of Illinois Press (2000). Waldrep left academia in 1996 in order to join the New Order Amish community then at Yanceyville, N.C. Subsequently he received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop (2005)
and returned to academia with visiting assistant professorships at Deep Springs College and Kenyon College before joining the faculty at Bucknell University in 2007. From 2007 to 2018 he served as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review, and from 2011 to 2021 he was editor of the journal West Branch. He is a member of the Old Order River Brethren and divides his time between Lewisburg, Pa., and Franklin Co., Pa. 

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 3-4, 2025. 

NHBF Author: Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the forthcoming collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), and the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four previous collections of poetry. 

Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

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 3-4, 2025. 

Main Street Poetry Project: Call for Poems by New Hampshire High School Students

The NH Book Festival and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire in partnership with New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello and the Academy of American Poets are seeking poems by high school students to be featured in Concord as part of the Main Street Poetry Project.

Deadline: September 15th, 2025

For more information, visit the Poetry Society of New Hampshire's website.

Book of the Week (8/4/2025)

The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec by Rodger Martin (Natureculture, 2025)

The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec is a collection of poetry and short prose pieces built around the sometimes subtle at other times quite public influence dogs generate as they integrate themselves into our culture. --Publisher's blurb

"Rodger's sleeping dogs don't lie. They know their canine ancestors, their legends in ancient caves, and we learn of ourselves in our relation to them. Rodger deftly moves across history, at each stop showing where we fit, an existence we neglect at peril. This volume, a kind of "collected" through his career, engages at every turn, with sensuous, heartfelt lines, perfectly executed (some prose, a few cats, and several silly pups!). Open wherever you wish and be rewarded."- B. Eugene McCarthy

About the author:

Rodger Martin is the managing editor of The Worcester Review and teaches journalism at Keene State College. This is his fourth volume of poetry. He is an artist for the New Hampshire State Arts in Education roster and a touring artist for the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA). He has been awarded an Appalachia Award for poetry and a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts award for fiction. He was born in the amish country of Pennsylvania, lived in England as a child, served as a combat engineer in Vietnam, and spent many years teaching both in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Join Rodger Martin and Linda Warren at The Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH on Saturday, August 16, 2025 at 11 am as they discuss and read Rodger's poetry.

NHBF Author: Abbie Kiefer

Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024) and the
chapbook Brief Histories (Whittle Micro-Press, 2024). 

Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Atlantic, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other places. 

She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire.

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 3-4, 2025. 

Book of the Week (7/28/2025)

Heart of the Universe 21 and the Tower: Poem Prayers by Skye O. Stephenson (Carnelian Press, 2024)

Poem Prayers invoking the Heart of the Universe with a mystical voice both personal and transcendent. Inspired by Spirit and a dream with Rabindranath Tagore, these mystical poems weave through the perennial questions with a fresh and unique voice for times such as these. Brave and bold, this collection of wisdom poems crackle with sparks of the divine. --Publisher's blurb

“I composed these poem-prayers during the global pandemic.  The words came to me from Spirit, during meditations, and I changed them very little.  This book is a way to share them with you.  May they touch your heart and soul, and lighten your path in life.” -Skye Stephenson

About the author:

Skye Stephenson lives in Keene, New Hampshire. She has written a monthly column in the Monadnock Shopper for fifteen years. Recently retired from Keene State College, where she served as Director of the Global Education Office, her interests include writing, spirituality, and sacred sites. Her recent collection of poetry is, in part, inspired by two of her favorite poets: Tagore and Neruda.

Join Skye at Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH on Sat., August 23, 2025 at 11 am where she will be presenting her new poetry collection.

NHBF Author: Iain Haley Pollock

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a
Place, and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, September 2025). He has
received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di
Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. 

His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, PoetrySociety.org and The Progressive. 

Outside of publishing poems, Pollock has performed his work widely, from the Dodge Poetry Festival to libraries and art centers; he curated the Rye Poetry Path, a public poetry installation in Rye, NY; he serves on the editorial board at Slapering Hol Press and on the board of Tiger Bark Press; and he edits the literary journal Inkwell. Pollock directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY and lives in the Lower Hudson Valley

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 3-4, 2025.