Former Maine Poet Laureate Explores Creativity at Gilley Museum

Description

SOUTHWEST HARBOR — The Wendell Gilley Museum welcomes former Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum as the museum’s November People-Nature-Art guest, on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 7pm for an online-only program. It is free and open to all. Sign up at www.wendellgilleymuseum.org

Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems; a book of brief essays on craft and community called “The View from Here;” he compiled and edited “Visualizing Nature,” a set of deeply personal essays on nature, ecology, sustainability, climate change, and philosophy by a wide range of contributors that honor nature's power to heal, inspire, guide, amaze, and strengthen.

He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted “Poems from Here” on Maine Public Radio, and was the host/curator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.

He was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.

People-Nature-Art is a monthly program from the Gilley that explores the connections between art and nature.