Robert Coffin

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin was a native Mainer, Bowdoin College graduate, and longtime Bowdoin faculty member. Though popular writer and speaker in his time, his work is not widely known today. In this podcast episode, Kevin Belmonte, who recently completed a Master’s thesis on Coffin for the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, considers why. In the process, he shares pieces of Coffin’s correspondance and reads three poems aloud. Belmonte lives in York, Maine, where his family has resided since the 1630s. He is the author of William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 2007), for which he received the John Pollock Award for Christian Biography. He has served as a script consultant for the BBC and PBS.

Permission to read Coffin’s poems in this episode was generously granted by the Estate of Robert P. Tristram Coffin. We were also assisted by the staff at the George J. Mitchell Dept. of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin, where Coffin's papers are held. To leave your feedback, please add a comment to this post.

Neil Rolde

Neil Rolde's 2006 book, Continental Liar from the State of Maine, is a biography of James G. Blaine, the Maine politician who dominated the American political stage from just before the Civil War and almost until the twentieth century. A former Maine politician himself, Rolde is a prize-winning historian and author of Unsettled Past, Unsettled Future: The Story of Maine Indians; The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine's Wildlands; Maine, Down East and Different; and many other books. A former Board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and won the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2005.

Feel free to leave your thoughts on Rolde's book as a comment on this blog post. Thanks!

Jeff Shaara

The Steel Wave is the second novel in what will be a trilogy of World War II stories by Jeff Shaara, who has also written about the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Mexican War, and the first World War. Shaara is the son of the late Michael Shaara, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Killer Angels, and got his start as a novelist when he was asked to write both a sequel and a prequel to his father's bestseller.

Please leave your feedback on this Brown Bag Lecture from the Portland Public Library here.

Shara McCallum

Shara McCallum is the author of two poetry collections, The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh, 1999, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) and Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh, 2003). McCallum was born in Jamaica, where she lived until she was nine with Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents. She directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. Here, she is introduced by fellow poet Charles Martin.

McCallum's reading took place in Freeport during the winter residency of the Stonecoast MFA program in January, 2008. This is the last recording from the winter residency that we will post. (The summer residency is less than one month away!) We'd love to hear what you thought of this series of podcasts, and whether or not you're interested in hearing more from Stonecoast writers.

Lewis Robinson

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories and the forthcoming novel Water Dogs, due out from Random House in January 2009. A graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award. Here, he is introduced by fellow fiction faculty member Lesléa Newman.

Robinson's reading took place in Freeport during the winter residency of the Stonecoast MFA program in January, 2008.

Ashley Bryan

This interview with Ashley Bryan by Charlotte Albright was included on the Council’s 30th Anniversary CD, “Maine Writers Speak.”

Born and raised in New York City, Ashley Bryan has found a home in Maine. Folklorist, writer, illustrator and performer, Bryan draws on African myths and tales, his own and others’ experience, and his literary, artistic and thespian talents to create children’s books (enjoyed by adults, too) and storytellings in schools and other venues, sometimes under the auspices of the Maine Humanities Council. (Read about his appearance at the 2005 Born to Read conference here.) Bryan’s newest book is Let it Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals (Simon and Schuster, 2007).

You can leave your feedback in the comments section, below.

Amy Hand

Amy Hand is the children's librarian at the Camden Public Library. In April, 2008, she read aloud from some of her favorite children's books for Humanities on Demand. She also shared some songs and rhymes that go along with the books.

We hope you can find some children or grandchildren to listen with you, then let us know what they think!