Poetry at the Library: Helena Minton and Maya Janson

All are invited to an in-person poetry program in the Concord Free Public Library’s Goodwin Forum on Sunday, December 11, from 3 – 4:15 p.m. Highly-praised poets Helena Minton, former Concord resident, and Maya Janson of Western, MA will read from their recent collections and engage in a Q & A about craft, influences, and the writing life. Books can be purchased before and after the reading. All are welcome to stay after the program for conversation and refreshments.

“Helena Minton’s poetry career spans over forty years, and “Paris Paintbox” serves as a welcome retrospective of her powerful and understated work. Minton, based in Andover MA, writes poems that are delicate, sensitive, and steel-eyed, too, possessing a distinctly New England point of view and a highly attuned power of observation and insight.”- Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe New England Literary News.

“An acute consciousness of duality in life and language shapes Janson’s second-utterly astonishing-collection, setting known phrases rogue, and whole poems a-spin…These poems seek truths about living within doubleness through a divine vision always worldly, witty, musical – and profoundly healing.” – Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone.

Helena Minton’s previous collections include The Canal Bed, The Gardener and the Bees, and The Raincoat Colors. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Sou’wester, Ibbetson Street, The Listening Eye, West Branch, Nasty Women Poets, An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace. She worked for many years as the director of a public library and has also taught English Composition and Creative Writing. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and serves on the Board of the Robert Frost Foundation, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She lives north of Boston.

Maya Janson’s first book, Murmur & Crush, was published by Hedgerow Books. Janson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, Lyric, Guernica, Alaska Quarterly Review, Jubilat, and other journals, as well as Best American Poetry. A graduate of Smith College and Ada Comstock Scholar ’87, she also holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she has worked as a lecturer in creative writing at Smith College and as a community mental health nurse.

Register HERE for a Seat in the Forum.

The Poetry at the Library Series is sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.