Poetry Workshop – Breaking the Silence: Writing Toward Healing and Resilience with Mary Brancaccio and Ellen Goldsmith

This workshop is FULL. If you would like to add yourself to the waitlist, please click here. When completing the form, please write “Waitlist” after your name. You will be contacted if a spot opens up!

The Camden Public Library is delighted to welcome back poets Mary Brancaccio and Ellen Goldsmith for another poetry writing workshop on Friday, February 16, 12:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. in the Picker Room. Breaking the Silence: Writing Toward Healing and Resilience is grounded in the idea of writing as a tool to process grief, illness and loss. Through poems and writing prompts, we will explore the concepts of absence and presence, hiding and revealing, speech and silence. The goal is to help participants develop ideas, begin drafts of poems, and learn how to address common obstacles to writing about personal experiences. Useful strategies and poetic craft moves will be presented.

Mary Brancaccio is the author of Fierce Geometry, published by Get Fresh Books Publishing. Her poetry has appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Minerva Rising, and Edison Literary Review, Adana Literary Journal, among others. She has an MFA in Poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Brancaccio’s poetry is also included in Writing the Land: Maine and Writing the Land: Northeast, as well as two international anthologies of poetry. Her website is ghostgirlpoet.com.

Ellen Goldsmith is the author of Left Foot, Right Foot, Where to Look, Such Distances and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect, winner of the 1997 Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in numerous journals including The Healing Muse, Intima, Bellevue Literary Review as well as the anthologies Wait: Poems from the Pandemic and Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest. Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York, she lives in Cushing Maine.