Nickole Brown Submitted photo

Jessica Jacobs Submitted photo

FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington continues its celebrated Visiting Writers Series with a reading featuring poets Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs. Brown and Jacobs will read from their work at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 10, in The Landing in the Olsen Student Center. Sponsored by the UMF Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, the series events are free and open to the public.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from The Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for 10 years. She’s the author of “Sister,” first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book,” Fanny Says” (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017.

Currently, she is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, N.C., where she periodically volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. A chapbook called “To Those Who Were Our First Gods” won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and a long sequence called “The Donkey Elegies” will be published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of “Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going,” a memoir-in-poems of love and marriage, and “Pelvis with Distance,” a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Guernica and The Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor and now serves as Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal.

As the only Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program in the state of Maine and one of only three in all of New England, the UMF program invites students to work with faculty, who are practicing writers, in workshop-style classes to discover and develop their writing strengths in the genres of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting. Small classes, an emphasis on individual conferencing, and the development of a writing portfolio allow students to see themselves as artists and refine their writing under the guidance of accomplished and published faculty mentors. Students can pursue internships to gain real-world writing and publishing experience by working on campus with The Beloit Poetry Journal, a distinguished poetry publication since 1950; or Alice James Books, an award-winning poetry publishing house.