About The Poets Corner

Writing is a journey of discovery, an exploration of our world and our understanding of it. Yet it is often a solitary endeavor. The Poets Corner was created to give us opportunities to make it a communal experience as well.

August 2020 Short Prose and Prose Poetry readers on The Poets Corner. From the top left: co-founder Kathrin Seitz, administrator Gabrielle Attra, poet Eric J. Evans, second row from left: photographer/writer Judy O’Dell, essayist/journalist Peter Imber, co-founder Meg Weston, bottom row: author Phuc Tran, writer/actor Lucinda Ziesing.

Poet Ellen Bass and founder Meg Weston on The Poets Corner.

Summertime Open Mic July 2021 Open Mic reading, featuring a musical performance by Elvis & the Mopes.

The Poets Corner was founded in June 2020 to foster community among writers and readers interested in poetry and short prose. Nearly five year later, The Poets Corner has grown to serve a thriving community of over 7,000 people from around the world.

In free monthly readings on Sundays over Zoom, we’ve hosted many amazing poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Ellen Bass, Richard Blanco, Naomi Shihab Nye, Natalie Goldberg, and so many others reading and talking about their work. We also give emerging writers opportunities to submit through at least two Open Calls each year, where poets are selected to read their work on a particular topic or theme.

Our bi-annual chapbook competition has been judged by Naomi Shihab Nye (2022) and Marie Howe (2024) and gives an opportunity for an individual poet to have their work published by Toad Hall Editions, receive a $1,000 prize, and to read their work on a Zoom group call with the contest judge.

Recently, we’ve added Craft Talks that allow folks, for a reasonable fee, to explore deeply the works of an individual poet, or some aspect of the craft of writing.

After the pandemic, we began partnering with others to bring you local in-person events and opportunities. The Camden Festival of Poetry takes place in May each year in Camden, Maine and has featured keynote speakers including: Richard Blanco (2023), Pádriag Ó Tuama (2024), and Jane Hirshfield (2025).  We co-host monthly Open Mics with Toad Hall Editions in Searsport, Maine, and in partnership with Millay House Rockland, we are able to put a spotlight on an exciting Writer-in-Residence program that is open to writers of all genres.

Our Geography of the Imagination Workshops have taken place for the past several years in Iceland (2022, 2023, 2024) then in Monhegan (2025), with future workshops planned for interesting hotspots to creatively explore nature and writing.

The Poets Corner is a busy hub of activity, designed to connect you to sources of inspiration for your writing and everyday living. Our readings regularly draw audiences of 200 or more, and sometimes more than 2,000! An exciting place to engage with voices that help us explore and understand our world.

The Poets Corner was founded by Meg Weston and Kathrin Seitz. Meg now serves as Director and Host, working with Liz Kalloch as Strategy & Design Director, and Lucas Adair as our Technical Director.

For more information contact thepoetscornermaine@gmail.com

Founders and Directors

  • Meg founded The Poets Corner in June 2020, along with Kathrin Seitz, to bring community to the often solitary yet transformational experience of writing poetry and prose. In 2020, Meg retired from her position as President of Maine Media Workshops + College, where she established The Writers Harbor program to complement media arts curricula in photography, filmmaking, and book arts.

    In parallel to a successsful career in business and media, Meg Weston has had a lifelong fascination with volcanoes. She’s traveled around the world pursuing her desire to witness the power of the earth in its processes of destruction, creation and transformation. Here work can be seen at www.volcanoes.com. Meg completed an MFA in Creative Writing from Leslie University in 2008, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on creative non-fiction and photography.  Over the past ten years she has studied poetry from many wonderful teachers including Richard Blanco, Kevin Pilkington, Tess Taylor, and Ellen Bass.  Meg is now focused on writing, teaching, and engaging with other writers, artists, and creative thinkers. Meg has published three volumes of poetry including a chapbook Letters from the White Queen in 2021, Magma Intrusions, from Kelsay Books in 2023, and To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems with Margaret A. Haberman in 2024. All of these are available in our shop.

  • Kathrin Seitz is a co-founder of The Poets Corner, although she is no longer involved due to health constraints. She’s had a career as a writer, editor, producer and professional coach who spent thirty years as a creative executive in the publishing, television, film, animation and toy industries in Los Angeles and New York City. As a coach, she worked with private clients around the country and conducted Method Writing Workshops (jackgrapes.com ) in Midcoast Maine, New York City and Florida.

    Her writings have been published in Evergreen Review, Lear's Magazine, Onthebus, Method Mad (a magazine she created with her students), The Herald Gazette and Maine Home+Design. Kathrin received an MFA in Fiction at Spalding University (Class of 2015) and subsequently worked on finishing her novel.

  • Liz Kalloch is a book designer and abstract multi-media artist. After art school {with a minor in comparative literature}, her early design years were spent as an in-house designer with several publishers, but her “real” work began when she started her own design business, collaborating with authors and artist, to find the thread that would weave together the ideas and the words into the visual and concrete.

    Liz is the co-founder and design director at Toad Hall Editions, a small press in midcoast Maine founded in March 2021. She was also the co-founder and design director for a creative arts and literary magazine called Mabel: Making a Living Creating a Life. She has published one book called Tools and Talismans: 100 Conversations in Watercolor— the story of how she created a still-life studio diary, a record of stories from 100 women about their most treasured tools and talismans.

    Curiosity, enthusiasm and restlessness are her cornerstones, and though she’s been looking for the fourth for quite some time, she’s made peace with the fact that there may only ever be the three. She enjoys odds more than evens.

Our Advisory Board

  • Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

    Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir.

    He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

  • David Brunell, his wife Pam, and their two sons lived in Africa and Vietnam for 17 years. David and Pam together created the book “Beloving,” an autobiography in poetry form with eighteen love poems and stories about the African bush and elephants. David has worked on 5 continents and 20 countries as an economic development leader and a catalyst for transformation in third world countries. He’s created a farm sanctuary in Maryland.

  • Pamela Brunell, who writes as Pamela Smith, recently published, Beloving, a book of poems centered on the 17 years she spent with her husband and two sons in Africa and Vietnam. Beloving is an autobiography of transcendent moments in poetry form. You’ll discover 100 poems and stories and 70 images about the African people, the African bush, elephants, love, yoga, nature, family, friendship, the chakras, a meditation, and prayers.

    Pamela previously managed marketing and sales with global futurist, bestselling author, John Naisbitt. She was a keynote speaker about Megatrends. She directed, produced, and performed in plays in Zambia and Zimbabwe. She presently lives on a farm and nature sanctuary in Maryland where she cavorts with honeybees, wildflowers, butterflies, and a resident Canadian goose couple and their adopted duck.

  • Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. An historian of medieval mysticism, he is a much sought-after speaker and retreat leader in the US and Europe on spirituality and the arts as transformative channels of creativity. Together with Jon Sweeney, he has published three books of meditative poems inspired by Meister Eckhart’s writings, most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light which was awarded the Gold Medal by the Nautilus Book Awards in 2024. His translations of German poetry include, most recently, the first full-length translation of the German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin’s poems, The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin (2023) and a new translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024). He also recently published You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024), cowritten with Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, ME.

  • John Paul Caponigro a pioneer among photographers working with digital media. His art has been exhibited internationally and purchased by numerous private and public collections including Princeton University, the Estée Lauder collection, and the Smithsonian.

    John Paul combines his background in painting with traditional and alternative photographic processes using state-of-the-art digital technology. A form of environmental art in virtual space, his work is about the perception of nature and the nature of perception. His life’s work is both a call to connection with nature and a call for conscientious creative interaction with our environment during a time of rapid change.

    He is a highly sought-after speaker, lecturing extensively at conferences, universities, and museums, in venues as diverse as Photoshop World, MIT, Google, and TEDx.

    John Paul’s work has been published widely in numerous periodicals and books including Art News and The Ansel Adams Guide. Author of the video training series R/Evolution and the book Adobe Photoshop Master Class, for over twenty years he has been a contributing editor to a variety of magazines and websites including Camera Arts, Digital Photo Pro, The Huffington Post, andApple.

    John Paul is a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, Epson Stylus Pros, and X-Rite Coloratti. His clients include Adobe, Apple, Canon, Epson, Kodak, NEC and Sony.

  • Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His second book, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, and Orion. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family.

  • Natalie Goldberg is the author of 15 books including Writing Down the Bones which has sold over one million copies, has been translated into fourteen languages, and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. Her latest book (published by New World Library, December 2020) Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage to the Heart and Homeland of Haiku.

  • Ellen Goldsmith is a poet and teacher. Her books include Left Foot, Right Foot, Where to Look, Such Distances and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect, which won the 1997 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition and was described by Dennis Nurkse as an “incandescent collection.” Her poems have appeared in many journals and in anthologies.

     She earned an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, has an M.A. in English from City College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Queens College. She is Professor Emeritus from the City University of New York. In 2006, she relocated to Maine, where she enjoys the rich literary landscape of the Midcoast as well as the always changing views of Broad Cove from her home in Cushing. For her, poetry is essential, a way to explore and discover, uncover and recover.

  • Margaret Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. She is, by profession, an American Sign Language interpreter, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine in the Linguistics Department. Her poems have been published in the kerning | a space for words, Island Journal, the journal Spiritus, and selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here.

  • Roger Leddington was a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, reporting from Moscow, Paris and Lagos. Subsequently he ran several businesses before retiring to Lake Tahoe and biking and hiking in the Sierras. He moved to Camden, Maine in 2016 where he bikes, hikes and swims with his wife, Meg, and two dogs.

  • Anna Limontas-Salisbury is a New York-based poet, writer, freelance journalist, and educator. She is a graduate of Hunter College and Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Her poetry can be found in SFWP Quarterly, The Poets Corner, and La Libreta. Raising Mothers nominated her poem “Some Mothers III” for Best of the Net 2021. She has been a featured poet at Camperdown, a poetry reading series at Halyards, Honey Dipped Productions, Body Love, Leaf Lit Live, and WOC Reading Series.

  • Jana Mohr Lone is Executive Director of the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) and holds an affiliate faculty appointment in philosophy at the University of Washington.  She has led philosophy classes with students from kindergarten to graduate school for over 25 years.  Jana is the author of many books and articles about young people's philosophical thinking, including Seen and Not Heard (2021), The Philosophical Child (2012), and most recently What Would You Do? (2024) six pictures books about ethics.  She is a poetry lover and has written and run workshops about the intersections between poetry and philosophy.

  • Audrey  teaches writing and literature at the University of Maine and is a member of the Nine Poets of Maine. Her work has been published by DownEast Books, DownEast Magazine, Habitat: Magazine of the Maine Audubon Society, and The Maine Standard Literary Magazine. She sits on the Advisory Board of The Poet’s Corner and is the founding artist and creative director of the Highland Grove Artist Residency in Bridgton, Maine. Her first novel, Gray Ledges, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2025.

  • Kevin is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of nine collections: Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner; Getting By won the Ledge chapbook award; In the Eyes of a Dog received the New York Book Festival Award; The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree was a Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award finalist.  His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England.  Over the years, he has been nominated for four Pushcarts.  His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including: The Harvard Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review, etc.  He has taught and lectured at numerous colleges and universities including The New School, Manhattanville College, MIT, University of Michigan, Susquehanna University, Georgia Tech.  His debut novel Summer Shares was published in 2012 and a paperback edition was reissued in summer 2014. His collection Where You Want To Be: New and Selected Poems was a 2017 IPPY Award Winner.  A new collection entitled Playing Poker With Tennessee Williams was published in 2021.

  • Austin’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Foglifter, Pleiades, Hobart, Ugly Duckling Presse’s SecondFactory, The Columbia Review, TinHouse, Narrative, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at The University of Texas at Austin. He has received fellowships and institutional support for his poetry from ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Michener Center for Writers, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Fire Island Artist Residency.

  • Richard Reitz Smith is an artist and designer who creates work within the fine arts as a painter, printmaker, book artist. Within book arts, he is a letterpress printer, as well as a bookbinder and papermaker. He relishes opportunities to blend any or all these disciplines wherever he can and is steadily improving his writing skills to better incorporate his love of language into his work.

    Richard is currently the chair of the Book Arts Program and studio manager at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine where he teaches workshops in letterpress printing, book creation and design. He works with other artists to offer a wide range of classes at Maine Media. 

     In the past few years, since being the inaugural book artist in residence at Maine Media Workshops + College, he has collaborated with artists, designers, and writers to create limited editions. Some of these have been placed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England and both the Beinecke and Haas Libraries at Yale University, among other collections.

  • Sandy Weisman is a poet and visual artist. Her poetry has been included in two anthologies and several other journals and her artwork has been exhibited locally and in the Boston area .  Her artist books include Ontogeny, Book of Hours; she is currently working with Maine Media Workshops to produce Objects of My Desire, a book of poems, prints and images based on the concept of astonishment.

    Sandy is the owner of 26 Split Rock Cove, a privately-owned artist community of studios, artist living space, and workshops overlooking Mussel Ridge Channel in South Thomaston, ME.