Longfellow Days: SUNDAY READINGS

Longfellow Days joins Bowdoin College in celebrating the 200th anniversary of the notable Graduating Class of 1825, which included two of the school’s most distinguished alumni: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  This year’s Sunday Readings are inspired by the Maine literary legacy they established and focus each week on a different century of American poetry.

February 9 at 1 PM, Fireplace Room, Curtis Memorial Library 

In 1925, for the 100th anniversary of the Class of 1825, Bowdoin invited to Brunswick numerous leading poets & writers of the period for an impressive literary festival. In similar fashion, three poets of today help us look back a century, as well as sharing their own poetry. Gibson Fay LeBlanc reads Robert Frost, Dawn Potter reads Edna St. Vincent Millay, & Mike Bove reads Langston Hughes.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry in 2021. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, and Orion, and he currently serves as Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Dawn Potter is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry—most recently the poetry collection Calendar. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, she has also won a Maine Literary Award for nonfiction and has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writer’s Center, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals. After teaching at the Frost Place for more than a decade, she now leads poetry programs at Monson Arts. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Mike Bove is the author of four books of poetry. He served as a 2024 Writer-in-Residence at Acadia National Park and is Associate Editor for Hole in the Head Review. Mike is professor of English at Southern Maine Community College and lives with his family in Portland, Maine where he was born and raised.