Frost Farm Poetry

2018 Hyla Brook Reading Series

Join a community of poets and poetry lovers who gather in the intimate setting of Robert Frost's barn to hear nationally-acclaimed poets read their work.  Except for June, readings begin Thursdays at 6:30pm, include a reading by a Hyla Brook poet before the featured reader and are followed by an open mic. All readings are free and open to the public. For easy reminders, click the icons at bottom of the page and follow us on social media.

                               David Davis - Thursday, May 17, 6:30pm

David Davis has been a member of the Powow River Poets since 2005.  He is currently the Poet in Residence at the Joppa Flats Audubon center.  He has published three books of poetry:  Crossing Streams on Rocks, Joppa Flats, and The Joy Poems.  The Joy Poems have been described as "an instruction manual for feeling more joy in life." Davis will read primarily from The Joy Poems at The Frost Farm.

Special Event:

Frost Farm Poetry Conference Keynote  Speaker Melissa Balmain 

 & Frost Farm Prize Winner Susan de Sola- Friday, June 15, 7pm

Melissa Balmain is Editor of Light, America's premier journal of light verse. She teaches humor writing, poetry writing, and journalism at the University of Rochester. A winner of the Able Muse Book Award, she has been a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award, and the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (twice). Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, Rattle, The Spectator, and The Washington Post; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's, and Success. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (Able Muse Press) is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

Susan de Sola’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse and the Birmingham Poetry Review, among many other publications and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2018. She is a past recipient of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. Originally from New York, she holds a PhD from The Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of numerous critical essays, book chapters, and the photographic chapbook Little Blue Man (Seabiscuit Press). She will be a Poet in Residence at the forthcoming West Chester Poetry Conference and is an Assistant Poetry Editor at the journal Able Muse. de Sola has recently completed her first full-length poetry manuscript.

 January Gill O'Neil - Thursday, July 12, 6:30pm

January Gill O’Neil is the author of two poetry collections, Misery Islands and Underlife, published by CavanKerry Press. A third collection, Rewilding, will be published by CavanKerry Press in fall 2018. She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and board of trustee member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles have appeared in the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day series, American Life in Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. Misery Islands was selected for a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Additionally, Mass Center for the Book chose Misery Islands as a Must-Read Book for 2015 and it won the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award. Previously, January was a senior writer/editor at Babson College. She earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA at New York University. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts. 

Marilyn Nelson - Thursday, August 9, 6:30pm

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of some twenty books of poetry. Her Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), described as “ground-breaking” in several Children’s Literature textbooks, won Newbery Honors, Coretta Scott King Honors, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it appears almost in its entirety in The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005). A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), How I Discovered Poetry (2014), and My Seneca Village (2015) received similar acclaim. In 2017 she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Award and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry. Nelson held the office of Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006. At present she is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Poet-in-Residence of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Dudley Laufman- Thursday, September 13, 6:30pm

As a young boy, Dudley’s home was in Arlington, Massachusetts. Yet it was the people and places of New Hampshire that would reveal to Dudley the country dancing and music that would become his life’s work.  Working at Mistwold Farm, in Fremont, and time spent in the Monadnock Region encouraged his development as a musician and dance caller.  He started calling dances at age 18 while attending Norfolk County Agricultural High School in Walpole, Mass., and has never looked back. While enrolled at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture in Amherst, Mass., Dudley intended to become a dairy farmer.  It was here that he developed an interest in poetry and discovered the works of Hemingway, Hardy, Thomas, Burns and Sara Teasdale. Dudley began with lyrical and prose poems and his first book of poetry, “I Hear Ringing Reels” was published in 1962. Never one to write poetry as an assignment, when a poem is ready, he sets it to paper. At age 87, Dudley is still fully engaged in a 65-year career as a dance caller for local country dances throughout New England. He plays his melodeon, harmonica and sometimes, when his fingers allow, his fiddle, at old town halls, farmer’s markets, folk festivals, weddings, barn dances, kitchen junkets and for the Canterbury Morris dance team. On occasion, he is hired by elementary schools to teach old-time dances for children, a personal favorite for Dudley.