Please join us as we welcome poet Betsy Sholl as part of our Ann P. Hammond Memorial Literature Series.

Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry, As If a Song Could Save You, was published in the fall of 2022. She will be reading from this book, and talking about her life and writing. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Some of her book awards include the Four Lakes Prize, the 2015 Maine Book Award for Poetry, the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize, and the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry. She is a founding member of Alice James Books and published three earlier collections with them. Among her other awards are a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and two Maine Writer's Fellowships, and the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Distinguished Achievement. In 2022 she was awarded the degree of Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Southern Maine.

Her work has been published in many anthologies, including Letters to America, Contemporary American Poetry on Race, Best American Poetry and Best Spiritual Writing, and a range of literary journals, including Plume, Brilliant Corners, Field, On the Seawall and Image. She has taught in a range of institutions, from elementary schools to prisons to MIT, and for thirty years at the University of Southern Maine. She was visiting poet at the University of Pittsburgh and Bucknell University, and currently teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.