The 2024 Poetry Hotline
Selected poets
ONGOING
Hotline #: 207-828-5607
SPACE has re-connected the 2024 Poetry Hotline, a 24/7 call-in number and ongoing audio exhibit featuring a new poem every few weeks. The hotline is 207-828-5607. The ongoing audio exhibition began on December 16, 2023.
Dec 4-Jan 5
Mihku Paul
A Snail Primer
Originally published in From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets from the Northeast (NatureCulture, 2023)
Mihku Paul is a Wolastoqey poet and interdisciplinary artist who grew up on a wild Maine river. Her family hails from Kingsclear First Nation, N.B. Canada. Mihku has spent decades working in Portland Public Schools on enrichment curriculum for Waponahki Studies.
Recent work includes Love Letter for a Wild Maine River (Sebago Lake Storytelling Project – forthcoming documentary), Msi-te ktahkomiq kintaqot (Whitman on Walls) and an experimental film collaboration with filmmaker Dawn Nye, Putep Qotatokot-te Elewestaq (The Whale was Speaking). Mihku lives and works in Portland.
Nov 13-Dec 3, 2024
Machar Nguany
motion
Machar Nguany is 25 years old and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He started writing poetry after hearing his sister recite one of her pieces. He saw the emotion she was able to invoke in people and knew he wanted to do the same.
Oct 7-Nov 3, 2024
Marcellus Williams aka Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniel
“At last…Another’s heartbeat”
Read by Genius Black
The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on September 24, 2024 despite new evidence suggesting he was wrongfully convicted for a 1998 killing that he consistently maintained he did not commit. Williams died by lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay. He was 55 years old, a devout Muslim, an imam for other incarcerated people, and a poet. The case’s prosecutor, jurors and the murder victim’s family all pleaded to stop the execution. Read more.
Genius Black, also known as Jerry Edwards, is a social innovator, entrepreneur, writer, and musical artist based in South Portland.
Naturally a storyteller and motivator, he focuses on collaboration and audio/video production as a craft. Genius curates a collaborative network and collective of musical talent, GEM CITY, driving the intersection of art, culture, and quality of place unique to Maine’s coast.
He holds a degree in Africana Studies and an English minor from Bowdoin College. Genius is a media and communications organizer for TheThirdPlace and a proud board member of Portland Media Center.
Contact Genius with questions, concerns or podcast episode ideas: geniusblack7@gmail.com
Sep 4-Oct 6, 2024
Éireann Lorsung
“Along the Leie, fields full of the memory”
Read by the author
Éireann Lorsung (pronounced “Erin”) is a writer, teacher, and maker of things, currently living between Maine and Dublin, Ireland. Her first book, Music for Landing Planes By, was named a ‘new and noteworthy’ book by Poets & Writers. Her second book, Her (a poem from it can be found at the Poetry Society of America), came out from Milkweed in 2013 and was beautifully reviewed in Zzyzzyva; a chapbook, Sweetbriar, came out the same year. Her third book, The Century, which LitHub named as one of their “most anticipated” 2020 titles, came out in October 2020 and has been reviewed in Ploughshares, the Portland Press Herald, the Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly, among other places. The Century also won the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Éireann was a 2016 NEA Fellow in creative writing (prose).
Éireann’s website is here.
August 1-31, 2024
Maria Gray
“Target Practice”
Read by the author
Maria Gray is a poet from Portland, Oregon, in unconditional support of a liberated Palestine. An MFA candidate in creative writing at NYU, her work is forthcoming from or published by ONLY POEMS, Best New Poets, and others, and she has received honors and fellowships from organizations including poetry.onl, The Lumiere Review, The Adroit Journal, Bates College, and New York University. She is the managing editor of COUNTERCLOCK Journal and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she helps run the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers’ National Student Poets Program.
See the SPACE Reader for more info and a text version.
July 1-31, 2024
Katherine Ferrier
“Spiral Woman (homage to Louise Bourgeois)”
Read by the author
This poem originally appeared in 2021 as part of ARTWORD: Ekphrasis at the PMA, a joint program of Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and the Portland Museum of Art.
In celebration of the long, intimate relationship between poetry and visual art, MWPA and Portland Museum of Art created ARTWORD in collaboration with beloved poet, teacher, activist, and MWPA co-founder Lee Sharkey (1945-2020). Poets are invited to choose a work of art from the PMA collection, and respond to it ekphrastically.
From the PMA website:
“Ekphrastic poems respond to—address, confront, inhabit—works of visual art. From Rilke to Elizabeth Bishop to Janice R. Harrington and Tyehimba Jess, poets have engaged paintings, prints, sculptures, and photographs in ways that illuminate what the eye may not detect in the original. When poem and artwork are in conversation, each shines in the other’s light.”
Katherine Ferrier (she/her) is a queer poet, dancer, textile artist, teacher, and community organizer based in Rockland, Maine. Her research grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists. Her work has been featured in Uppercase Magazine, The Knot, Contact Quarterly, and several poetry anthologies, including A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, and a self-published collection of photographs and poems about making, called Thread Says Stay.
A chronic instigator of collaborative and community actions, she creates generative situations for makers and thinkers to gather and share research. Before moving to Maine in 2016, she spent eight years in the White Mountains of NH, where she created and directed an international dance festival, managed a fine art gallery, designed innovative business trainings for artists, and taught a monthly ekphrastic writing workshop in galleries, inspired by the changing art exhibits. In 2016, she was named Arts Advocate of the Year by NH Citizens for the Arts, for her work on behalf of artists in the North Country.
Katherine is a founding member of The Architects, an improvisation ensemble whose collaborative performance history spans over 30 years, with whom she continues to teach and perform. Since 2019 she has been a core member of the (stillness) collective, a place based interdisciplinary and improvisational collaborative making work along waterways in Midcoast Maine.
Website
Instagram @katherinemferrier
May 28-June 30, 2024
Joseph Coleman
“Ghost Ship”
Read by Janet McTeer
“Ghost Ship” was originally published in The Northern New England Review.
Joseph Coleman (he/him) is a poet and short story writer with an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College (’22). He’s a registered Maine Guide, a Wilderness First Responder, entrepreneur and holds a blue belt in Jiu Jitsu. His poems have been seen in various forms in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New Criterion, The Northern New England Review, Casa Vogue and a chapbook – 45° North Latitude.
He’s a teaching poetry artist through the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute.
Instagram @josephpaulcoleman.
April 1-30, 2024
Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)
“If I Must Die”
Read by Fateh Azzam
Refaat Alareer (1979–2023) was a professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2013). He was killed by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023, along with his brother, nephew, his sister, and three of her children.
Fateh Azzam (author) was born in Beirut, his parents having fled Palestine in April 1948. He began work in theater in Maine as a mime, before moving to Boston in 1980 to work as an actor and choreographer. In 1985 he moved to Ramallah and was administrative director of the Nuzha – El Hakawati theatre in East Jerusalem. He returned to returned to Maine in 2016 after a 35-year international career in human rights advocacy that spanned work in NGOs, philanthropy, academia and the United Nations. He was a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and an Affiliate at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, and the former director of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship and Senior Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Relations, both at the American University in Beirut. He led the process of establishing the Arab Human Rights Fund. In 2024, Fateh co-produced and co-directed a stage production of The Gaza Monologues, originally written and produced by teenagers in Gaza in 2010, with students from Bowdoin College and Portland Public Schools. It was performed to two sold-out audiences at SPACE.
February 12, 2024–March 31, 2024
Iris McCloughan
“Made of Meat”
Iris McCloughan (they/them) is a writer, artist, and performance maker in New York City. Iris was the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review and was named a finalist in nonfiction for Best of the Net 2020. They are the author of three poetry chapbooks, including triptych (greying ghost, 2022) and Bones to Peaches (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). Their writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Prelude, Tupelo Quarterly, juked, jubilat, Gertrude, Denver Quarterly, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, among many others.
Iris’s performance work has been presented in New York (The Poetry Project, Castelli Gallery, Ars Nova, Movement Research at Judson Church, PAGEANT), Philadelphia (Institute of Contemporary Art, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Contemporary), Chicago (Links Hall), Minneapolis (Bryant-Lake Bowl), and Detroit (Public Pool). Most recently, they directed the Off-Broadway premiere of Alex Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Playwrights Horizons). They have collaborated with many other artists and writers, including Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, Mike Lala, Toby Altman, Jessie Young, Doug LeCours, and Julie Mayo.
Follow them on Instagram @immcclou.
Stay tuned as we fill out the 2024 Poetry Hotline schedule, updated every few weeks through Spring 2024.
January 14, 2024 – February 11, 2024
2.
Sa Whitley
“Prayer Circle”
Call 207-828-5607 to hear Sa read the poem.
Sa Whitley (they/them) is a Black queer feminist poet and postdoctoral scholar in the School of Social Transformation and Women & Gender Studies at Arizona State University. They are a Cave Canem Fellow and a Poetry & the Senses Fellow with the Arts Research Center (ARC) at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
Whitley has published recent work in POETRY Magazine and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and they have received literary fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2022) and the Community of Writers. Whitley received a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and has held previous academic appointments with the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. In their spare time, they go to queer dance parties and watch sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.
Follow them on Instagram @bonitalemonbalm.
December 16, 2023 – January 14, 2024
1.
Noor Hindi, “Ode to Friendship”
Noor Hindi (she/her) is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2025). She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Follow her on Instagram @NoorKHindi.
The 2024 Poetry Hotline is a screenless exhibition available to anyone with access to a phone. The 2024 Poetry Hotline offers audiences a direct line to Maine-based and national poets and their visions for the future, and another medium to connect and inspire audiences with heartache, love, humor, rage, and regeneration.
