Poetry Reading

Join us for a captivating evening of poetry, where award‑winning voices bring atmosphere and inspiration to life as Carlene Kucharczyk reads from her acclaimed collection Strange Hymn and Tim Mayo shares selections from his latest book Muscle Memory of Love and Disaster.

Carlene Kucharczyk’s debut collection Strange Hymn is the winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry and the Vermont Book Award, and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2025. She is the recipient of a creation grant from the Vermont Arts Council and a research fellowship from the New York Public Library. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in journals such as Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, and Conduit, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University, and works as an administrative assistant in the English and Creative Writing department at Dartmouth College.

Tim Mayo is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections, The Kingdom of Possibilities (2009), and Thesaurus of Separation (2016) and two chapbooks, The Loneliness of Dogs (2008) and Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (2019). He holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from Bennington College. A ten-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a two-time finalist for the Paumanok Award, Mayo is also the recipient of three Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, as well as being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Montaigne Medal. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he worked for fifteen years at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, as both a teacher and a mental health worker, and where he is also a founding member and organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.