Poetry Day 2025

Sunday May 18th, 2025 is our next Poetry Day! Below you will find the schedule, pricing and further details about the day. Please contact Mel Edden using the form below with any questions. Registration will open in February.

SCHEDULE

10am - 11am — Ekphrastic Gallery Tour & Readings
11am - 12 noon — Keynote Talk by Grace Cavalieri, former MD Poet Laureate.
12 - 1pm — Lunch (included)
1 - 3pm — Poetry Workshops
3 - 4pm — Afternoon Tea & Cake
4 - 5pm — Poetry Readings (from workshops)

See below for further details on each event and guest speaker bios.

PRICING

$80 (Early bird rate until March 18))
$100 (after March 18)

Your registration fee this year is all-inclusive: access and participation in all events, activities, lunch, afternoon tea and a classy Manor Mill notebook and pwn. Also different this year: participants will register for workshops and choose a lunch during registration.

Registration opens in February. See below for Scholarship opportunities.

SCHOLARSHIPS

This year we are offering scholarships for 5 people to attend Poetry Day, and all its events, for free, including lunch and afternoon tea. Applicants must be aged 16 or above. To apply for one of these scholarships, please compose a letter of interest describing your personal poetry journey so far and why you feel Poetry Day at Manor Mill will help to further advance your writing skills. Letters of interest should be approximately 500-750 words and should be submitted by email to Mel Edden by March 18, 2025. If you need Mel’s email address, please complete the form below.

DETAILED SCHEDULE

Ekphrastic Event (10am - 11am )

Register in advance to read during our ekphrastic event. When registered, you will have the opportunity to write a poem that responds to one of the artworks that is on display in the galleries of Manor Mill during the event. The theme of this year’s exhibition this year will be “Horses & Hounds”. Participants will be given several weeks to write their poem either using a digital image provided or by visiting the galleries at Manor Mill to write directly in front of the artwork. On the day we will tour the galleries at Manor Mill listening to the poems in front of their respective artworks. A digital pdf of all poems and images will be produced and distributed to participants, but will not be shared online (for publication reasons). This event was a highlight last year.

TALK BY GRACE CAVALIERI (11am - 12 noon )

WRITING FOR MY LIFE

This talk will explore Grace’s personal beliefs in writing as a life force, in the value of poetry, and in energy as the conduit for creating. Grace will expand this to several ways of expression — the value of the narrative, and of the formal, the persona, and the monologue. The second half of the talk will be interactive, soliciting listeners’ questions, opinions and thoughts about anything connected to poetry; motivation, writing, distributing, etc.

LUNCH (12 NOON - 1PM)

Lunch is included in the registration price this year. Poetry Day participants will be able to preorder lunch from the Monkton Hotel Café during online registration.

AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS (1PM - 3PM)

Our afternoon workshops will be led by local poets Shirley J. Brewer, Matt Hohner and Michael Fallon. Workshop descriptions are listed below. Participants will chose and sign up for their choice of workshop during registration. Workshop spots are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.

Workshop #1 - Shirley J. Brewer

**Frosting on the Cake: A Tutorial on Titles**
**(or I Wrote This Poem. Now, What the Heck Do I Call It?)**
Join Shirley J. Brewer to explore suggestions and ideas about titles. What is their importance, and what can they do to enhance a poem, or any piece of writing?
Imagine the lackluster: *Gone with the Breeze, Stopping By 7-11 on a Rainy Morning, The Pigeon* (with apologies to Edgar Allan Poe). Work with Shirley to take your titles to the next level.
You’ll engage in stimulating and fun title exercises, and emerge with more confidence and clarity in choosing titles for your literary confections.
In the second half of this workshop, you’ll respond to two poetry prompts, and give each a smart and scintillating title.
You may also bring one poem that has been giving you a title headache to be title-workshopped with the group.

Workshop #2 - Michael Fallon

Learning to Use the Full Rainbow of Sound in Your Poetry:

A Workshop on Consonant Sounds, Alliteration, and Consonance
*Consonance* is the repetition of consonant sounds in general; *alliteration* is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words.
Today, we *see* poetry much more often than we actually *hear* it read. As a result, many contemporary writers, even poets, often do not pay enough attention to sound in their work. Sound is another way of creating music, imagery, and ultimately meaning and emotion in poetry, to neglect it is to write, at best, dull prose but certainly not good poetry.
So let's try writing some poems that take advantage the vivid, powerful sounds of different families of consonants—all of which create different kinds of music--and try using them in patterns of alliteration and consonance.

Workshop #3 - Matt Hohner

*Details to follow.*

AFTERNOON TEA (3PM - 4PM)

After the workshops, a British-style afternoon tea will be served by our poetry host, Mel Edden, with home-baked cake. This will be a time to relax, reflect, make new acquaintances, chat with our workshop poets and buy their books. Afternoon tea is included in the registration price this year.

poetry readings from workshops (4PM - 5PM)

After tea, we will gather in The Loft to listen to readings from our Workshop Poets and hopefully some freshly-brewed poems from our afternoon workshops. Sharing is optional.

GET TO KNOW THIS YEAR’S GUEST SPEAKER AND OUR WORKSHOP POETS:

Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s Tenth Poet Laureate. She’s the author of several books and plays. Her latest poetry books are: The Long Game: Poems Selected& New (2023;) Owning The Not So Distant World (2024;) and I Haiku Too (2024.) “Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory,” and “Quilting the Sun” were the latest plays mounted in NYC. She founded, produces and hosts “The Poet and the Poem,” for public radio, 48 years on-air. Grace holds the AWP’s George Garrett Award, two Allen Ginsberg Awards, the Pen-Fiction Award and The CPB Silver Medal among other honors.

Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore MD) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology and on the board of directors of Passager Books. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems garnish Barrow Street, Passager, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Slant, Welter, among other journals and anthologies. Shirley’s poetry books include A Little Breast Music (Passager Books), After Words (Apprentice House Press), and Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag). Her fourth poetry collection, Wild Girls was published by Apprentice House Press in June, 2023. Shirley's poems are part of the Lunar Codex program, and are currently on the moon! To learn more about Shirley, visit her website.

Michael Fallon is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he taught expository writing, creative writing, and literature for 35 years. He has been President of the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society and an editor of Puerto del Sol and was the founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review. Poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, Slipstream, The Bangalore Review, and many other publications. Fallon is the winner of two Fellowships in Poetry from the Maryland State arts Council in 1988 and in 2009 and is the author of 5 published collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black, Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011; The Great Before and After, BrickHouse Books, 2011, and the self-published, Empire of Leaves, Singing Man Press, 2018. Fallon’s poems have been frequently recorded on CDs and broadcast on Public Radio. His recent poetry chapbook, Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, was published by Writer’s Relief, and won the 2021 Water Sedge Poetry Prize. To sample his work, read reviews, blogs and more, visit his website.

Matt Hohner has won or placed in numerous national and international poetry competitions, including wins in the Doolin International Poetry Prize in Ireland, the Oberon Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Maryland Writers’ Association Prize. His publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, Sky Island Journal, The Cardiff Review, The Storms Journal, New Contrast, Live Canon, and Prairie Schooner. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s first collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House) was published in 2018. His second collection, At The Edge Of A Thousand Years, won the 2023 Jacar Press Full-length Book Prize, selected by poet Carolyn Forché, and was published in 2024.