Acclaimed New England poet Baron Wormser to read from his work April 22

The University of New England will host a poetry reading by former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser on Thursday, April 22, 2010 from 6-7:30 p.m. in the St. Francis Room of the Ketchum Library on the Biddeford Campus.

The reading is free and open to the public.

Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry and a poetry chapbook. He is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry and the author of a memoir and a collection of short stories.

He teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program and the Fairfield University MFA program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005 and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005.

Books he has authored are as follows: The White Words (Houghton Mifflin, 1983); Good Trembling (Houghton Mifflin, 1985); Atoms, Soul Music and Other Poems (Paris Review Editions, 1989); When (Sarabande Books, 1997); Mulroney & Others (Sarabande Books, 2000); Subject Matter (Sarabande Books, 2004). His chapbook, Carthage, about a personage who is a president of the United States was published by The Illuminated Sea Press in 2005.

His memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, published by The University Press of New England in October, 2006, has gone through four printings and was issued in paperback in April 2008.

An edition of new and selected poems entitled Scattered Chapters was published by Sarabande Books in April of 2008. Also in April of 2008 CavanKerry Press published a volume of short stories entitled The Poetry Life: Ten Stories. One of those stories, "William Blake," was selected as a winner of a 2006 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction from Southwest Review. His ninth book of poetry Impenitent Notes is due out in March of 2011 from CavanKerry Press.

Books he has co-authored are as follows: Teaching the Art of Poetry: the Moves by Baron Wormser and David Cappella (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day by Baron Wormser and David Cappella (Heinemann, 2004).

He lives with his wife on 26 acres in Cabot, Vermont.