Iconic Maine poet and bird guide at Gilley April 28
Maine’s Kristen Lindquist is April People-Nature-Art speaker
SOUTHWEST HARBOR — Kristen Lindquist is a poet and writer with a special focus on landscape and the natural world. “For me, joy often comes in the form of hours spent in the field birding, an experience I love to share with others as a nature guide and through my writing,” she says.
She will share her art in person at the Wendell Gilley Museum as the Gilley’s People-Nature-Art speaker for the month of April on Tuesday, April 28, at 7 p.m., preceded by an artist’s reception at 6 p.m. Admission is free but reservations are required. The program will be livecast simultaneously; please indicate when you sign up whether you will attend in person or online. Sign up at www.wendellgilleymuseum.org/calendar.
Since 2009, Kristen has maintained a daily haiku blog, Book of Days. In addition to writing, she also teaches and has led haiku workshops around the state. She is the coordinator of The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun, as well as the Haiku Society of America’s Regional Coordinator for the Northeast (New England). She is also co-editor of Autumn Moon Haiku Journal
An avid birder since childhood, Kristen served as the first female member of the Maine Bird Records Committee. She guides bird outings around Maine for various organizations, including the Acadia Birding Festival, which is co-hosted by the Wendell Gilley Museum.
Her work has received awards including two Maine Press Association awards for outdoor writing. Garrison Keillor has shared three of her poems on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. Maine State Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum has read several of her poems on Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here.
If you’re on Monhegan Island this summer, you might see her working at the Monhegan Museum of Art & History. She currently serves on the board of Monhegan Associates, the island’s land trust.
When she’s not on Monhegan, she lives in her hometown of Camden, Maine, with her husband, novelist Paul Doiron.
Kristen attended Middlebury College in Vermont and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. She worked many summers at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in venues including Down East, Maine Times, Bangor Metro, and Bangor Daily News, as well as various literary/haiku journals and anthologies. Most notably, she was included in the anthology A New Resonance 12: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2021), and her haiku were featured on Cornell’s Mann Library’s Daily Haiku Page. Her books include the chapbook Invocation to the Birds (Oyster River Press, 2001); Transportation (Megunticook Press, 2011), which was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award; Tourists in the Known World: New & Selected Poems (Megunticook Press, 2017); the haiku e-chapbook It Always Comes Back (Snapshot Press, 2021), which won the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award; and the haiku collection Island (Red Moon Press, 2023).
People-Nature-Art is a free monthly series that brings artists, writers, carvers, and creative types of all kinds to the Gilley to explore how nature and art interact in their work, and how their art impacts their own approach to nature.