Stuart Kestenbaum Contributed photo

The Camden Public Library and the Stewardship Education Alliance plan to host Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 27, for a special evening of poetry.

The event will kick off a two-week “Poetry on Windows” (POW!) celebration in downtown Camden. Kestenbaum is to read selections of his work, discuss the creative process, and participate in a question and answer session with the audience. The presentation will take place on Zoom.

Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, most recently “Things Seemed to Be Breaking” and a collection of essays, “The View from Here.” He was host of the Maine Public Radio program “Poems from Here” and host/curator of the podcasts “Make/Time” and “Voices of the Future.” He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015.

More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.

Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the New York Times Magazine, the Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016 to 2021.

The alliance will announce more details soon about its second annual POW! event. POW! is a celebration of poetry and the environment in which talented scribes draw poetry (written by students in local schools) on the windows of Camden storefronts. This year Maine poet Brian Evans-Jones is working with students in fifth and seventh grades at Camden-Rockport Middle School in preparation for POW! For the latest information, visit stewardshipeducationalliance.org.

To request a link to attend, email jpierce@librarycamden.org. For more about the library’s event with Kestenbaum, and for information about other upcoming programs from the library, visit librarycamden.org.