We kick off the new season with four National Beat Poets Laureate — Paul Richmond, Tommy Twilite, Chris Dean, and Erine Leigh.
Laney & Lu has PARKING! Bring your own beverages if you wish, and your poems!
Paul Richmond was awarded beat poet laureate three times: MA, National, and Lifetime from NBPF. He has performed nationally and internationally. He has been published in many journals and anthologies; he is also a publisher of over 80 writers and has 8 books himself. He created Human Error Publishing and performs with “Do It Now.” For more, www.
Tommy Twilite is a Massachusetts troubadour who combines music, poetry, exploration and adventure into his performances. He is the co-founder and director of the Florence Poets Society and the host of the Twilite Poetry Pub on WXOJ Valley Free Radio. His latest chapbook, “Kills No Bird” is a follow up to his 2021 collection, “Fifty Words for Rain.” Tommy is the editor of the Silkworm annual review, and is a Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate. He believes poetry and song can renew the Earth.
Chris Dean, incoming Indiana Beat Poet Laureate (2025-2027) is a storyteller, graphic designer and Magpie Poet who writes from the heart of Indiana where they live with their husband and too many cats to mention. Along with Wendy Cartwright, Chris is co-founder of Keeping the Flame Alive Press. Their work has been featured online, in multiple print anthologies, and they are the author of “tales from a broken girl,” “we’re all stories in the end,” and the forthcoming “not an angry girl” from Keeping the Flame Alive Press.
Erine Leigh is a Seacoast writer who served as poet laureate of Portsmouth, NH from 2015 to 2017 and Beat Poet Laureate of NH from 2021 to 2023. Recently awarded Lifetime Beat Poet status with NBPF. Her community project, which included children of varied ages and backgrounds, was called Poems For Peace. It was centered around the values connected with the community’s response to disturbance of Portsmouth’s African Burying Ground, raising awareness of our past. In 2015, she worked with Jerome Meadows, designer of the ABG, on a production celebrating its history, called Blank Page Poetry, performed live at 3SArtspace and also live at the Burying Grounds. Leigh was awarded the Sarah Farmer Peace Award in 2018, by Green Acre Bahai Center in Kittery, Maine.
She has attended The Salty Quill Women Writers Retreat on McGee Island in Maine in the springs of 2022 and 2023. Her work has been published widely in local anthologies, and in two volumes in collaboration with local photographer, Sarah Flause. Several of her collections can be accessed for free at BeeMonkPress.com. Erine facilitates workshops for the Wheaton Writing Academy and the Eastport Arts Center, and has presented a program for NHPS on the topic of ‘Jane Kenyon and Edna St Vincent Millay, in contrast. Most recently, her poem ‘Year of loss: 2024’ was included in an anthology published by Evergreen Press called ‘Defiance! Maine Poets Protest The Attack On Democracy.’