Claire Millikin & Bea Gates will read, convene and talk together about their work.

Thursday October 15
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library

5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614

co-sponsored by Blue Hill Public Library

 

Nightlight (Unicorn Press 2026) is a summoning of ghosts, speaking back to the inheritance of America’s deep South. In Nightlight, Claire Millikin invokes histories of cultural and personal wounds, placing them in conversation, illuminating the political struggles of contemporary America through remembering and recasting its past. Millikin, whose family and ancestral roots are in Georgia (USA) writes of childhood there and also reflects on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, drawing from the poet’s years teaching at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. 

Bea Gates will read from “None of the Above” on LGBTQ love, surviving and joy; and selections from “Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921)” imagining the woman who discovered the means by which Hubble measured the universe. Tongo Eisen-Martin has said, “Gates’ talent for motion through convergence makes all phenomena music.” Gates’ The Burning Key, New & Selected Poems (1973-2023), includes work from seven books.

 

Claire Milliken is the author of ten poetry collections, including Magicicada, a book about juvenile solitary confinement and winner of the 2024 Foreword Indies Award for Poetry. Millikin’s recognitions also include a Charles Simic Poetry Prize, Editor’s Choice; the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize; and the W.B. Yeats’ Society Poetry Prize. Originally from Georgia (USA), Millikin teaches art history for the University of Maine system and for the Maine Media Workshops and College. Millikin lives in coastal Maine.

 

Beatrix Gates has published six poetry collections, including the Lambda Poetry Award Finalist, In the Open. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Ucross, and the Huntington Library and she received a 2022 Maine Arts Commission Poetry Award. Widely anthologized among LGBTQ poets, her work has been published in Ploughshares, Sinister Wisdom, and The Kenyon Review. She received NEA support, as librettist, for The Singing Bridge and a Witter Bynner Translation Award with Electa Arenal for Jesús Aguado’s The Poems of Vikram Babu. Gates founded Granite Press (1976-1989) in Penobscot, Maine, as a Book Artist and feminist publisher where she published Grace Paley’s first book of poetry, Leaning Forward, and the bilingual IXOK AMAR.GO, Central American Women Poets for Peace. Gates has taught writing for over 25 years in graduate and undergraduate programs and community settings. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Antioch College. She grew up in Boston and has had significant time in NYC and San Francisco. She lives in Maine.