01/29/2025
Stay tuned to our website to register for one of three writing workshops at the festival this year:
Mihku Paul is a Wolastoqey writer and visual artist born and raised on a wild Maine river. She is an enrolled member of Kingsclear First Nations and a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program and her poetry has appeared in multiple anthologies, including Dawnland Voices, POEISIS, Atlantic Vernacular and both Wait: Poems from the Pandemic and Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest (Littoral Books). Most recently she presented Msi-te Ktahkomiq Kintaqot (The Whole Earth Resounds) for Maine Conservation Voters Evening for the Environment. Forthcoming work will debut at the Maine Historical Society’s upcoming exhibit Notorious: Maine Crime in the Public Eye, 1690-1940 and a new anthology, Cape Cod to Nova Scotia: Art, Ecology, Poetry of the Gulf of Maine (2027). Mihku lives and works in Portland.
Her collaborative experimental film, Putep Qotatokot-te Elewestaq (The Whale was Speaking) also on Climate Change, premiered at the Belfast Poetry Festival and can be viewed at this link:
https://vimeo.com/872130145
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Jeri Theriault is a Maine poet and visual artist. She is the author of several poetry collections: Self-Portrait as Homestead (2023), Radost, my red, 2016) In the Museum of Surrender (2013), and the editor of Wait: Poems from the Pandemic (2021). Her poems and reviews appear in The Atlanta Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Plume, and many other publications. Recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize. Jeri lives in South Portland.
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Our keynote poet, Natalie Diaz, was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry described as an “ambitious … beautiful book.” Her other honors and awards include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Diaz lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she has worked with the last speakers of Mojave and directed a language revitalization program. In a PBS interview, she spoke of the connection between writing and experience: "for me writing is kind of a way for me to explore why I want things and why I'm afraid of things and why I worry about things. And for me, all of those things represent a kind of hunger that comes with being raised in a place like this.”
https://www.theshipmanagency.com/natalie-diaz
One with our https://www.uma.edu/about/events/plunkett-festival/
“My body is its own lexicon and I also fight for a language, in Mojave and English, that helps me to hold it in the space of love.”
