Poet Laureate Happenings

New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello completed their Main Street Poetry Project the last week of September, with 44 poems by NH poets total hung in businesses along Main Street in Concord, including US and NH state poets laureate as well as 29 poems by high school students from around the state, representing 9 of NH’s 10 counties. The project was made possible by the Academy of American Poets.

The Festival welcomed Jennifer Chang as the spotlight poet at noon on Saturday, Oct. 4, in the Capitol Center for the Arts (CCANH), 44 S. Main Street.

Militello launched the Main Street Poetry Project in partnership with the New Hampshire Book Festival and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. This program was made possible by the generous support of the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to readings by Chang and New Hampshire poets at the festival, poetry was displayed in local businesses in the week leading up to the festival.

“Businesses along Main Street were eager to participate,” Militello says, “and more poems will be hung in windows and visible to passersby than we had ever dreamed! From Charles Simic’s poem describing a fork to high school students portraying grandparents’ houses and backyard jasmine, this is a project that highlights many facets of our everyday community here in the state, and that will connect various pockets of the state’s population through the common gift of language.”

Below are a few pics!

Jennifer Militello has also made available Identifying the Pathogen, their brand-new hybrid poetic fiction feminist set of lab notebooks on pre-order! Below are links for ordering from the press itself (the option kindest to the literary community) and from Amazon.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/I/bo266703924.html

https://www.amazon.com/Identifying-Pathogen-Jennifer-Militello/dp/1961209446/