Listed in alphabetical order
Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of the collections Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her MFA at NYU and has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, and Community of Writers. From 2022 to 2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. She currently teaches at the University of New Hampshire as the Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. Author website: diannelyantigua.com
Oliver de la Paz, born in the Philippines and raised in Ontario, Oregon, is an American poet and educator. Author and editor of seven books of poetry, his latest, The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright Press, 2023), is long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry. His previous collection, The Boy in the Labyrinth (University of Akron Press, 2019) was long-listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Worcester, Massachusetts. He is a founding member of Kundiman and teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Bardic Gifts and Epic Tales — Saturday 3:45 PM
Dominican-born Rhina P. Espaillat is a much-honored Newburyport bilingual poet, essayist, short story writer, translator, and educator. Her ninth full-length book of poetry, For Instance: Poems will be released by Wiseblood Books on her next birthday, January 20, 2026. Her published work includes poetry, essays, and short stories appearing in over 200 magazines and anthologies. She is a founding member of two long-lived, active poetry workshops: NYC’s Fresh Meadow Poets and Newburyport’s Powow River poets. Honors include the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, Richard Wilbur Award, and Oberon Poetry Prize.
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Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her most recent is Pastorals (Measure Press, April 2025), a collection of vivid prose poems that reflect on rural life, family, and nature with allusions to the classics. She is awaiting release of My Cloak Is Poetry: A Prosimetrum on Myth (Able Muse Press, 2026). Hadas is the recipient of many honors and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is professor emerita at Rutgers University-Newark, where she taught English for many years. Her translations from Greek include plays by Euripides and a book of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus; she is currently book reviews editor of The Fortnightly Review and original English verse editor of Classical Outlook. Author website: www.rachelhadas.net
Poet and translator A.M. Juster’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, and The Paris Review. His most recent of thirteen books is his just-released translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton. Prior recent book publications include Wonder and Wrath (Paul Dry Books, 2020), Gerytades (Contubernales Books, 2023), and an illustrated children’s book, Girlatee (Paul Dry Books, 2025). He is the only three-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and he has won the Richard Wilbur Award and other significant literary prizes. He also worked in senior capacities for four presidents of both parties, including six years as Commissioner of Social Security, for which he received a number of honors, including Humanitarian of the Year from the National Alzheimer’s Association.
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Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Home and Away; her work has been awarded the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, and the Able Muse Book Prize, among other honors. A professor emeritus of music at Bridgewater State University, she has published articles on the intersections between music and literature in numerous academic journals. She lives on the coast of Massachusetts.
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Jenna Lê is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011); A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association; and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry by the Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a BA in math and an MD and works as a physician and educator. jennalewriting.com
James Najarian grew up on a goat farm in Berks County, Pennsylvania. He teaches nineteenth-century British literature at Boston College, where he edits the journal Religion and the Arts. His latest scholarly publication is his exceptional Minor Poetry in Late Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). His poetry, in The Goat Songs, won the 2017 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry (University of North Texas Press, 2018). For his poem “The Dark Ages,” he won the 2016 Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry. His poems appear in The Powow River Poets Anthology II (Able Muse Press, 2021) and elsewhere.
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Bardic Gifts and Epic Tales — Saturday 3:45 PM
Started by two Newburyport High School students, Poetry Soup has been simmering for thirty years. During that time hundreds of young poets have participated in the monthly readings that include an open mike for students and an adult featured speaker. Thanks to visits from exceptional mentors, students have been inspired to find their voices and recognize the power of their words.
Alfred Nicol’s latest book of poems, After the Carnival, was published by Wiseblood Books in March 2025. He has published three other collections: Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016), Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2010) and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), winner of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. He has collaborated with Rhina P. Espaillat and artist Kate Sullivan to create the chapbook Brief Accident of Light (Kelsay Books, 2019), and with his sister, the artist Elise Nicol, to create Second Hand Second Mind (Blurb, 2011). Nicol also edited The Powow River Anthology (Ocean Press, 2006). His poems have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2018, Contemporary Poetry of New England, and in Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, and have appeared in Poetry, Commonweal, The Hopkins Review, The Dark Horse, New England Review, The Montreal Review, First Things, America, and The Formalist. Powow Member Page.
Bardic Gifts and Epic Tales — Saturday 3:45 PM
To honor the memory of Charles Coe, the three original Diminished Prophets will perform a Melopoeia using two poems of Charles Coe, followed by a moment of silence. Rhina P. Espaillat and Alfred Nicol will read the poems accompanied by John Tavano on Spanish guitar.
Melopoeia is an ancient art whose Greek name—a combination of melos (“melody”) and poiein (“to make,” root of the word poeta, “maker,” and poetria, “poetry”) suggests its nature: a performance involving poetry recited to a musical accompaniment. The poetry is spoken, not sung in the form of song lyrics, so that the two arts flow separately, through and around each other, without either becoming dominant over the other.
Jan Schreiber was Poet Laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts, from 2015 to 2017. His poetry books include Digressions (1970), Wily Apparitions (1992), Bell Buoys (1998), Peccadilloes (2014), and Bay Leaves (2019). His translation of The Poems of Paul Valéry came out in 2021. A collection of his criticism, Sparring with the Sun, was published in 2014 and a new one, Breath Lines, appeared in 2025. An advisory editor of Think journal, he teaches in the BOLLI program at Brandeis University and runs The Critical Path, an annual symposium on poetry criticism. Author website: janschreiber.org
Alfred Nicol will present poems from his new collection, After the Carnival, published by Wiseblood Books. Nicol was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light. Previous books include Animal Psalms and Brief Accident of Light, a collaboration with Rhina Espaillat. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, America and other journals, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2018 and Contemporary Catholic Poetry. Nicol’s translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance (Wiseblood, 2022) has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.” Powow member page.
