The Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author event with Maine poet and architect Rosa Lane, on August 7 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room. Rosa will be joined in conversation by Bea Gates, her friend and local poet, about Called Back, Rosa's latest poetry collection. 

Called Back, Rosa's newest collection, a title representing the last two words that Emily Dickinson wrote, is a theatrical monologue written in conversation with Dickinson. This work is based on recent research that reveals the LGBTQ significance of Dickinson as evidenced in both her poetry and her letters.

Rosa Lane is author of four poetry collections including Called Back (Tupelo Press, 2024), winner, 2025 Maine Literary Book Award, a work in queer conversation with Emily Dickinson; Chouteau's Chalk (University of Georgia Press, 2019), winner, Georgia Poetry Prize; Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016), winner, National Indie Excellence Award; and Roots and Reckonings (chapbook). Her work was named Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, awarded the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, and selected as finalist for the 2023 Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition. Lane’s poems have appeared in Cloudbank, Cutthroat, Nimrod, RHINO, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere She lives in South Portland with her wife. Website: www.rosalane.com

Beatrix Gates is a local poet. Gates’ The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023) features new & uncollected poems, limited editions, award-winning translations & selections from seven books, including Lambda Poetry Finalist, In the Open. A MacDowell, Ucross, NEA and Maine Arts Commission Awardee, Gates founded Granite Press (1975-1989) where she published Lane’s Roots & Reckonings, 1980, as a letterpress chapbook. 

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