Poetry Day 2025

Sunday May 18th, 2025 is our next Poetry Day. Below you will find a draft schedule and further details about the day. Please contact Mel Edden with questions. Registration will open shortly.

DRAFT SCHEDULE:

10am - 11am — Ekphrastic Event
11am - 12 noon — Talk by Grace Cavalieri
12 - 1pm — Lunch
1 - 3pm — Poetry Workshops
3 - 4pm — Afternoon Tea
4 - 5pm — Poetry Readings (from workshops)

Ekphrastic Event (10am - 11am )

Register in advance to read during our ekphrastic event. When registered, you will have the opportunity to write a poem that responds to one of the artworks that is on display in the galleries of Manor Mill during the event. The theme of this year’s exhibition this year will be “Horses & Hounds”. Participants will be given several weeks to write their poem either using a digital image provided or by visiting the galleries at Manor Mill to write directly in front of the artwork. On the day we will tour the galleries at Manor Mill listening to the poems in front of their respective artworks. A digital pdf of all poems and images will be produced and distributed to participants, but will not be shared online (for publication reasons). This event was a highlight last year.

TALK BY GRACE CAVALIERI (11am - 12 noon )

More info to follow.

LUNCH (12 NOON - 1PM)

Lunch is included in the ticket price. Poetry Day participants will be able to preorder lunch from the Monkton Hotel Café during online registration.

AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS (1PM - 3PM)

Our afternoon workshops will be led by local poets Shirley J. Brewer, Matt Hohner and Michael Fallon. Workshop descriptions are listed below. Participants will chose and sign up for their choice of workshop during registration. Workshop spots are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.

Workshop #1 - Shirley J. Brewer

*Details to follow.*

Workshop #2 - Michael Fallon

Learning to Use the Full Rainbow of Sound in Your Poetry:
A Workshop on Consonant Sounds, Alliteration, and Consonance
*Consonance* is the repetition of consonant sounds in general; *alliteration* is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words.
Today, we *see* poetry much more often than we actually *hear* it read. As a result, many contemporary writers, even poets, often do not pay enough attention to sound in their work. Sound is another way of creating music, imagery, and ultimately meaning and emotion in poetry, to neglect it is to write, at best, dull prose but certainly not good poetry.
So let's try writing some poems that take advantage the vivid, powerful sounds of different families of consonants—all of which create different kinds of music--and try using them in patterns of alliteration and consonance.

Workshop #3 - Matt Hohner

*Details to follow.*

AFTERNOON TEA (3PM - 4PM)

After the workshops, a British-style afternoon tea will be served by our poetry host, Mel Edden, with home-baked cake. This will be a time to relax, reflect, make new acquaintances, chat with our workshop poets and buy their books.

poetry readings from workshops (4PM - 5PM)

After tea, we will gather in The Loft to listen to readings from our Workshop Poets and hopefully some freshly-brewed poems from our afternoon workshops. Sharing is optional.

GET TO KNOW THIS YEAR’S GUEST SPEAKER AND OUR WORKSHOP POETS:

Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s Tenth Poet Laureate. She’s the author of several books and plays. Her latest poetry books are: The Long Game: Poems Selected& New (2023;) Owning The Not So Distant World (2024;) and I Haiku Too (2024.) “Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory,” and “Quilting the Sun” were the latest plays mounted in NYC. She founded, produces and hosts “The Poet and the Poem,” for public radio, 48 years on-air. Grace holds the AWP’s George Garrett Award, two Allen Ginsberg Awards, the Pen-Fiction Award and The CPB Silver Medal among other honors.

Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore MD) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology and on the board of directors of Passager Books. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems garnish Barrow Street, Passager, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Slant, Welter, among other journals and anthologies. Shirley’s poetry books include A Little Breast Music (Passager Books), After Words (Apprentice House Press), and Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag). Her fourth poetry collection, Wild Girls was published by Apprentice House Press in June, 2023. Shirley's poems are part of the Lunar Codex program, and are currently on the moon! To learn more about Shirley, visit her website.

Michael Fallon is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he taught expository writing, creative writing, and literature for 35 years. He has been President of the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society and an editor of Puerto del Sol and was the founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review. Poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, Slipstream, The Bangalore Review, and many other publications. Fallon is the winner of two Fellowships in Poetry from the Maryland State arts Council in 1988 and in 2009 and is the author of 5 published collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black, Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011; The Great Before and After, BrickHouse Books, 2011, and the self-published, Empire of Leaves, Singing Man Press, 2018. Fallon’s poems have been frequently recorded on CDs and broadcast on Public Radio. His recent poetry chapbook, Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, was published by Writer’s Relief, and won the 2021 Water Sedge Poetry Prize. To sample his work, read reviews, blogs and more, visit his website.

Matt Hohner has won or placed in numerous national and international poetry competitions, including wins in the Doolin International Poetry Prize in Ireland, the Oberon Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Maryland Writers’ Association Prize. His publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, Sky Island Journal, The Cardiff Review, The Storms Journal, New Contrast, Live Canon, and Prairie Schooner. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s first collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House) was published in 2018. His second collection, At The Edge Of A Thousand Years, won the 2023 Jacar Press Full-length Book Prize, selected by poet Carolyn Forché, and was published in 2024.