“Out in May Back By October:” An Evening with Artist and Poet Summer J. Hart

Please join us for an evening with artist and poet Summer J. Hart, who will read from her debut poetry collection Boomhouse (The 3rd Thing Press, 2023) and discuss her monumental hand-beaded mill paper tapestry Out in May Back by October. Drawing its title from the book, the tapestry Out in May evokes the spring-to-fall season of Maine log drives on the rivers. Summer will discuss the process of collecting paper from the abandoned East Millinocket Mill, repulping, dyeing, drilling, and fashioning it into the 8000 paper beads she used to weave a portrait of her grandparents, who met on a First Nations reserve during a Great Northern Paper Company recruitment drive. Their lives are imagined in Boomhouse.

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Reception: Thursday, March 5, 5:30 pm
Event and book signing: 6 – 7:30 pm
Hannaford Hall, Portland Campus
Free and Open to the public.
Parking is available in the garage adjacent to the Abromson Center, $4/hour

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Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press). Summer is the winner of the 2023 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, and is the recipient of the 2022 Hellen Ingram Plummer Fellowship at MacDowell. Her poetry can be found in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press), Bedfellows, Heavy Feather Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in shows and galleries across the country. Summer is of Mi’gmaq and Anglo-Scottish descent. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

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