The Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author talk with Maine State Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma on Tuesday, February 25, at 6:30PM in the library’s Howard Room, for a talk on her poetry collection Midden, which investigates the history of Malaga Island.

In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-seven people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg that had been their home for generations. The erasure of the Malaga Island community included the removal of all dwellings and the island’s schoolhouse, the involuntary commitment of nine residents to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and the exhumation and mass reburial of seventeen graves. This atrocity was followed by a century of socially-enforced silence and as a result, many Mainers today still do not fully know the story of Malaga.

This talk will pair a discussion of Malaga Island and its residents with a reading of poems from Julia Bouwsma’s award-winning collection Midden, and will consider the history of this shameful event, the relevancy of this history to our current moment, and the process and implications of writing poems based on historic research.

Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, small-town librarian and Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2026). Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections, Midden and Work by Bloodlight, both of which received the Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book. She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME and teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington.

This program is free and open to the public. Blue Hill Books will be at the event with copies of the book available for purchase. For more information, please contact Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas[at]bhpl.net or call the library at 374-5515.