Poetry with Purpose Winning Entry

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Poetry with Purpose Contest
July 25, 2026
Winning Entry. Congratulations Susan Roney O’Brien!

        Crotched Mountain Air
                        by Susan F. Roney-O’Brien


When I couldn’t hear the hermit thrush, you danced its song– arabesques, 
plies, glissades– and the breeze brought scents of brocade and star mosses 
from the forest floor to dance upon.


When I couldn’t see, we linked arms, walked. We stroked ridged bark–
root to first branch– plucked and crushed a leaf, inhaled green, listened. 
Wind strummed twigs like strings.


When memory abandoned me, your words seeded the spring meadow
with clover and we waltzed to remembered harmonies embedded 
in the marrow of our bones.


When I couldn’t stand without braces, you took my hand and led me 
to the garden where the clematis vine, purple with velvet suns, 
embraced the lattice, climbed, shining.


When I think of you, grateful for your care, the forest pathway opens 
to the mountain and I am the earth in April, coming into my own–
blossoming, blossoming.

Openest Mic Returns to City Hall with Amanda Shea

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Openest Mic Returns to City Hall…This Time With Amanda Shea

Nationally renowned poet, activist and educator will perform a 20 minute set, then members of the community are invited to

share!


Fitchburg MA July 30 2026

The Openest Mic is delighted to invite you to the city hall of Fitchburg MA for an evening of poetry, music and
whatever else comes in the door! Everyone is invited to sign up at the event and we will showcase as many artists
as we have time for. All ages and talent levels are invited and encouraged to show off their original works: either
in a five minute spoken word set or with an acoustic original song. What constitutes spoken word? Poetry,
comedy, stories, or just sharing a viewpoint.


Maybe you’re not ready for the mic? That’s fine! Listen to an extended set from Amanda Shea! Amanda Shea
hosts WGBH’s Outspoken Saturdays, co-founded the ARTivism festival, has headlined Boston Black Pride and a
million other venues. She is Emmy nominated artist and a three time Boston Music Award winner, among many
other accolades.. She can create a jubilant energy and also share the most intimate depths. . Celebrate the 250 th
birthday of America by exercising your freedom of speech in a federal building, sharing the mic with this esteemed
poet!. To allow attendees to be truly unfiltered, this will not be streamed. Previous Openest Mic events are
available for viewing on YouTube and future events are usually streamed.

Admission is free and open to all. We ask attendees follow the same rules as any Openest Mic event: be polite
when people are speaking, no heckling and don’t overstay your time on the mic!


The Openest Mic was founded in 2023 with the mission of bringing artists together to collaborate and have fun.
Laura DiCaronimo hosts/curates and Tyler Hopp runs the A/V component. They have activated over a dozen
spaces including parks, breweries and Conquest Video, with over 200 performers gracing the mic. Poets,
dancers, yappers and many other types of creative have done many kind of acts at their shows, with the oldest
performer being 93 and the youngest being 4. In addition to hosting open mics, the Openest Mic has done
workshops with Fitchburg State University, the Fitchburg Historical society and just on a whim. We are always
open to collaborations of any type with any organization or individual as long as it sounds fun or does something
good for the world.

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For media inquiries, please contact:
Laura DiCaronimo
co-founder
openestmic@gmail.com
@listenstotheradio

This WEEK & WEEKEND Annoucements

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The Kunitz Medal Ceremony is happening TOMORROW Thursday July 23rd at 6:30pm at The Museum Of Worcester. Come honor Susan Elizabeth Sweeney!

Then, see if you can check out the Cinema Worcester’s showing of Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World at the Parkview Room.

         

           Fri     7/24.   7 pm

           Sat    7/25     1 pm

tickets $12 or Seniors $10

Enjoy your weekend Worcester!

Announcing the 2026 O’Hara Prize Winners!

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M (Maia) Campbell of Worcester, Massachusetts, has won the 2026 Frank O’Hara Prize. The O’Hara Prize, awarded annually by the Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA), was established in 1973. Campbell’s poem “apologia poetica” was selected by contest judge January Gill O’Neil from the 197 submissions by 75 entrants.

M (Maia) Campbell is a Jamaican-American poet. She has been a Brooklyn Poets fellow, and, in 2025, she won second place in the Frank O’Hara Prize Contest with the poem “When I Grow Up.” You can find published poems in Amistad, The Ana, Three Decker, and forthcoming in The Worcester Review. You can keep up with M at https://poeticallyexpressedthoughts.wordpress.com/.

Two additional winners were selected by January Gill O’Neil

  • Second Place – Dr. Huili Zheng of Rutland, Massachusetts, for “Legoland at Night”
  • Third Place – Michael Milligan of Worcester, Massachusetts, for “Among the Trees”

The winning poems will be published in the next edition of The Worcester Review, the nationally recognized journal of the WCPA. The winners also receive a cash award.

The WCPA will invite all the winners to read their work at the Winners’ Ceremony and Reading on Sunday, September 27, 2026, at 4:00 p.m.

The Winners’ Reading will be held at the WCPA Board Room 61 Harvard St. Worcester. Contest judge January Gill O’Neil will be our featured reader that afternoon.

Dr. Huili Zheng is an Associate Teaching Professor of Chinese language and literature at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature from Nanjing University and a doctoral degree from the University of California, Irvine. Her
scholarly monograph, Beyond Sinocentrism: Ethnocultural Other in Early Modern China, was published by Cambria Press in 2025. She also translated Professor Michael Fuller’s Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History into Chinese. Her creative writing explores themes of migration, memory, and cultural identity. She lives in Rutland, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and their golden retriever.

Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer and graphic arts production manager. Also a musician/composer, artist and writer. He took his MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College (thereby joining
the teeming mass of writers with degrees of dubious cachet), co-founded Poetry Oasis Worcester and was privileged to be an editor with Diner. His poetry book reviews, fiction and poems have appeared in Agni, Diner, The New Orleans Review, The Valparaiso
Review, Chaffin Journal, Blue Earth Review, Illuminations and others. He is the author of Unless I Came Back to Tell You, Kelsay Books 2021 and Failure of Flight, ICOE Press, 2026.

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Rewilding was a finalist for the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize and was recognized by Mass Center for the Book as a notable poetry collection for 2018. From 2012 to 2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil’s poems and articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and Ecotone, among others. In 2018, O’Neil was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. O’Neil is an associate professor of English at Salem State University, a board of trustees member with Montserrat College, and the chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs board of directors. O’Neil lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney declared 2026 Kunitz Medalist!

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Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Chosen for 2026 Stanley Kunitz Medal

Susan Elizabeth (Beth) Sweeney has been selected as the twelfth recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Medal, presented each year by the Worcester County Poetry Association to “a poet with a strong Worcester County connection who best exemplifies Kunitz’s lifelong commitment to poetry by teaching poetry, mentoring poets, speaking poetry, publishing poetry, and supporting organizations which nurture poetry.” 

Beth’s poems have appeared in Diner, Worcester Review, Friends Journal, Contour, Journal of Irish Literature, and elsewhere, and have won an Academy of Poets Prize, Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize, and other awards. Her chapbook, Hand Me Down (Finishing Line, 2013), was a semifinalist in the 2012 New Women’s Voices Competition. A decade later, Beth completed Close and Apart, a sequence of ten poems written for adaptation by composer Matthew Jaskot. The song cycle was performed by a dozen musicians—soprano Jennifer Ashe, baritone Brian Church, and a chamber group including members of a new music collective and an Americana roots band—at its world premiere in 2023.

Beth is past president of the Worcester County Poetry Association and founder of the annual College Poetry Contest, which awards the Elizabeth Bishop Manuscript Prize and Etheridge Knight Performance Prize to student poets from Central Massachusetts. She has taught creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross, mentored young poets at the annual Worcester County Young Writers Conference, served on the board of Poetry Oasis, and been an editor of The Worcester Review. Since 2022, Beth has directed Mapping Worcester in Poetry (MWiP), an initiative —supported by the Mellon Foundation through Scholarship in Action at Holy Cross —that identifies, documents, and marks sites connected to poems and poets while nurturing new poetry about Worcester places. MWiP has sponsored workshops; held the Poems in and out of Places contest; developed eleven virtual, driving, and walking tours on Worcester poets; created a brochure for the Stanley Kunitz Boyhood Home; and hosted twice-yearly readings at Elizabeth Bishop’s grave in Hope Cemetery. In 2024, Beth guest-edited a feature section of The Worcester Review, also titled “Mapping Poetry in Worcester,” that combined innovative scholarship on major Worcester poets, spatial poetics, and urban studies with new poems connecting to those earlier writers “across the mutual landscape,” in Christopher Gilbert’s phrase. In 2025, she guest-curated The Poem Next Door—an interactive exhibit at the Museum of Worcester from May 16 to December 31, which brought to life six famous poems set in the city—and organized ten events to accompany it. One event, “Tales from Poetry Town,” led her to establish the Worcester Poetry Archive at the museum, which now collects materials relating to poetry in Worcester since 1971.

Besides contributing to Worcester’s poetry community, Beth is professor of English and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Holy Cross, where she founded and directed the English Honors Program; co-founded and directed the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program; coordinated the Creative Writing Program; and directed the College Honors Program. In 2019, she became the second person to receive Holy Cross’s Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award for excellence throughout her academic career. A specialist in American prose narrative since 1800, Beth has published books and award-winning essays on detective stories, ghost stories, and modernist or postmodernist fiction, especially by Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Beth grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, graduated from Mount Holyoke College, and earned an MFA in Poetry and PhD in English at Brown University. She lives in Worcester with her husband, Michael Chapman, and their dogs.

The Stanley Kunitz Medal originated with a bequest to the Worcester County Poetry Association from the estate of former Poet Laureate of the United States and Worcester native Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006). Sweeney will be the twelfth recipient of the medal, which is bestowed annually on a poet with a strong Worcester County connection who best exemplifies Kunitz’s lifelong commitment to poetry by teaching poetry, mentoring poets, speaking poetry, publishing poetry, and supporting organizations which nurture poetry.

Also honored with a nomination this year are poets Karen Elizabeth Sharpe, Joe Fusco Jr., John Keogh, and Christopher Reilley.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney will give a reading and receive her medal at a ceremony presented by the Worcester County Poetry Association at the Museum of Worcester on Thursday, July 23, 6:30-8:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public. (Doors open at 6:00 pm.) There is limited parking at the museum, with additional metered parking on the street and in the Pearl/Elm Street Garage. Visit worcestercountypoetry.org for details.

Message from one of our members!

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“Joining the WCPA last year set me on a trajectory to improve my writing and to publish. 

I am grateful that it opened an opportunity first to hear a reading by the wonderful poet 

Susan Roney O’Brien and subsequently to work with her. That in turn provided a chance 

to join the Rosemont Poetry Workshop, to study with and learn from the excellent poets 

in the workshop, and to attend monthly Thirsty Lab readings of other fine poets. I look 

forward to my first reading with Thirsty Lab at the end of May. Finally of note, my first 

chapbook, “For the World, She Said,” has been accepted for publication recently and will 

be published later this year.“

      —Kathleen Granchelli

Announcing the 4th National Baseball Poetry Festival… and why it’s important!

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In a STEM-focused world, the National Baseball Poetry Festival and its contests exercise and celebrate the “right brain”…

… enabling writers of all levels, backgrounds, and genres to connect with and share their memories, attachments, and experiences with sports and play.

We’re the first-ever writing contest & special event to unite Sports and the Fine Arts, and formally recognize the hand-and-glove nature of artistic and athletic achievement.  After all, without the ancient Greek poets, we wouldn’t know the name of a single ancient Greek Olympic champion!

So… Batter Up!… Chatter Up! Visit the National Baseball Poetry Festival website here: https://baseballpoetryfest.org and make a FREE submission to the contest in any one of four youth and adult categories. Adult contest deadline: March 27th. While you’re at it, please take a minute to share this info with your friends and contacts who teach grades 4-12. Thank you!

Hot off the Press: Lewis Fellowship Winner Announced!

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We are so pleased to announce that the 2026 Dan Lewis Fellow is Worcester County’s own Michelle Koza!

Michelle Koza is a Brazilian and American Worcester-based artist, writer, and educator working under the name Michelle de Celia Lucia e Genevieve (aka Koza). Her art practice spans performance, poetry, and visual art, examining power, identity, and femininity. She is a co-founder of the Council of Radiants Artist Collective and serve on the board of the Worcester Artist Group. My visual and mixed-media work has been exhibited widely in Worcester-area galleries, including Arts Worcester, Hunchback Gallery, and JMAC. She is a recipient of the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building Grant (2025) and a NEFA Professional Development Grant (2026). She is also the 2026 Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA) Dan Lewis Fellow, and winner of a Worcester Arts Council (WAC) project grant (2026).

Her work uses mixed-media assemblage and embroidery to explore femininity, ritual, and liberation through craft-based processes and ornamental excess. She incorporates materials such as toys, fake flowers, rhinestones, washi tape, handmade paper, and fabric to create exuberant, decadent compositions that collapse the sacred and the everyday. Influenced by Brazilian visual culture and Catholic iconography, she employs radial forms, mirrors, and fragmentation to honor joy, suffering, and repair. Across series and scale, her work invites viewers to see themselves reflected in beauty, resilience, and what she calls Joyful Liberation.

Alongside her artistic practice, she has an extensive career in education. She has taught English and creative writing for over fifteen years and served as English Department Chair and Director of the Young Writers Conference at The Bancroft School.

About the Fellowship:

After his death, Dan Lewis’s family created an endowment with the Worcester County Poetry Association to support an annual fellowship bequest in his name to provide an aspiring Worcester County poet the means to fulfill a need in that poet’s development that might otherwise go unmet. The 2025 Fellowship award will be $2,500.