The poet and critic Daisy Fried will read in the New Writing Series on Thursday along with the winners of this year’s Millay Prize for Poetry, MA students April Messier, Miracle Gant, and Will Lathrop. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the IMRC Fernald APPE Space (Stewart Commons 104) at 4:30pm. A Q&A with the audience will follow the reading. Our friends at Briarpatch Books will be on hand with selected titles by NWS authors, including Fried.
In the summer of 2009, Frank and Helene Crohn generously provided the National Poetry Foundation (now the Center for Poetry and Poetics) at the University of Maine with the means to establish an Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize for Poetry. The Millay Prize seeks to reward achievement in poetry at a crucial early stage in a writer’s development while commemorating the legacy of one of Maine’s best known and most loved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who herself received the gift of an education at Vassar College in part through the generosity of Caroline B. Dow.
The external judge for the 2024 award was the poet Daisy Fried, who selected the following manuscripts for the Millay Prize:
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First prize to Will Lathrop for “Phloem and other poems”
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Second prize to Miracle Gant for “lung-home”
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Third prize to April Messier for “Curative Voicing”
Faahad Kabir, Sam Keeton, and Jacqueline Knirnschild received honorable mentions and more than ten thousand dollars in prize monies were distributed to the poets.
Will Lathrop is a first-year graduate teaching assistant concentrating in Poetry and Poetics. He received a BA in Religion from Princeton University in 2017 with minors in Creative Writing and Environmental Studies. He studies modernism and New American poetry, with interests in publishing histories, countercultures, and ecocriticism. Now in Bangor, Will previously lived and worked in Somerville, Massachusetts and Burlington, Vermont. He is a canoe guide and has paddled extensively throughout New York’s Adirondack Park and the Maine woods. He is originally from New Jersey.
Miracle Gant is a second year M.A. student and teaching assistant concentrating in poetry and poetics. Originally from Round Rock, Texas, right outside of Austin, she graduated from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a minor in drawing. Currently, she studies the lasting impact that the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement have on contemporary Black creativity. In her own poetic practice, she enjoys exploring what the relationship between language and imagery can tell us about the depths of our psyches.
April Messier is currently at the University of Maine working on her master’s thesis—a manuscript of original poetry and poetics. Her work explores the relationship between lineage and identity as well as the healing capacities of language and the natural world. She gathers inspiration from her deep connection to this land that her ancestors have steward for many generations, and which she herself has farmed for over a decade. April also enjoys spending time with her partner Eric, two dogs and the peace of woods and water—so easily accessed from their coastal Maine home.
