Come join us for our Annual Maine Town Meeting hosted at the Library on October 28, 2025. This year our featured speakers will be Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma and Award Winning Poet and Author Kristen Case.  For more than 20 years, the Margaret Chase Smith Library has hosted the Maine Town Meeting with scholars, politicians, and others speaking to topics that matter to the people of the state. This year we offer something slightly different than in years past: rather than two lectures and a few questions, we hope to open a conversation with the audience and the speakers about the topic of the day.

A box lunch will be available for $10.00 per person and can be purchased the day of the event with cash or check. People are also welcome to bring a bag lunch themselves.

This program is generously supported by the LaFond Family Foundation.

Agenda:

10:00-Coffee, Tea and Pastries
10:30-12:00 Intro/Brief Remarks/Discussion/Audience Participation
12:00-Lunch
1:00 Adjourn

To RSVP fill out the form here.  Registration closes at 11:59 PM, October 20 2025.  

Speaker Bios:

Julia Bouwsma-lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, currently serving a term from 2021 to 2026, and is the author of three poetry collections: Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is also the librettist for the short chamber opera, Ghost Apples, created in collaboration with composer Nathan Davis and the Halcyon Quartet. Bouwsma’s honors include a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards. Her work can be found in various publications including Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Daily. She has taught in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington, serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and works as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME.  

Kristen Case-is a poet and scholar. She is the author of Thoreau's Kalendar forthcoming from Milkweed editions and American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice as well as three books of poetry, most recently, Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers, most recently the Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. She is executive Director of the Monson Seminar. She lives in Maine.