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pasco lecture series

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – WESLEY MCNAIR

THE PASCO LECTURE SERIES PRESENTS
A CONVERSATION WITH WESLEY MCNAIR

Please join us on Sunday, October 30 at 2:00 pm for a conversation with poet, writer, editor, and professor, Wesley McNair. Wesley will be discussing his newest work, Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems, which will be released in September 2022. Late Wonders “is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.” [GODINE].

The Pasco Lecture series is sponsored by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library snack team.  This event is free to the public.  Copies of the book can be purchased through Graves Library or Fine Print Booksellers (Dock Square).  Call (207) 967-2778 for more information.

 

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – MAINE AUTHOR BRUCE ROBERT COFFIN

We are thrilled to welcome to Graves Library, Maine Author, Bruce Robert Coffin to talk about his new book  on Sunday, May 23 at 2:00 pm.   Mr. Coffin will be interviewed by local bookshop owner Kristen Kuehnle before an audience of none.  Signed copies of his latest book, Within Plain Sight, will be available for sale starting Monday May 10 here at the Library.  To order yours, please send us an email (ml@graves.lib.me.us) or call (967-2778).  This program will be available for viewing on Facebook (facebook.com/GravesLibrary), YouTube (youtube.com – Search Graves Memorial Public Library), and Kennebunkport local access television.

 

Bruce Robert Coffin is the award-winning author of the bestselling Detective Byron mystery series. A former detective sergeant with more than twenty-seven years in law enforcement, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine’s largest city. Following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Bruce spent four years investigating counter-terrorism cases for the FBI, earning the Director’s Award, the highest award a non-agent can receive.

His novel, Beyond the Truth, winner of Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Award for Best Procedural, was a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction. His short fiction appears in several anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2016.

Bruce is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He is a regular contributor to Murder Books blogs.

Bruce is represented by Paula Munier at Talcott Notch Literary.  He lives and writes in Maine.

 

 

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – MAINE AUTHOR SUSAN CONLEY

We are thrilled to welcome back to Graves Library, Maine Author, Susan Conley to talk about her new book Landslide on Sunday, April 25 at 2:00 pm.   Ms. Conley will be interviewed by local bookshop owner Kristen Kuehnle before an audience of none.  Signed copies of the book will be available for sale starting Monday April 12 here at the Library.  To order yours, please send us an email (ml@graves.lib.me.us) or call (967-2778).  This program will be available for viewing on Facebook (facebook.com/GravesLibrary), YouTube (youtube.com – Search Graves Memorial Public Library), and Kennebunkport local access television.

Ms. Conley is the author of five critically-acclaimed books, including her newest, best-selling novel Landslide — A New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Best Book/Most Anticipated of Winter/February ’21 by Good Morning America, The New York Post, Medium, Bustle, Biblio Lifestyle and others. Her previous, best-selling novel, Elsey Come Home, was a Most Anticipated/Best Book at Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Pop Sugar, Huffington Post, Southern Living, Fodor’s, and an Editor’s Choice at Amazon. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Lithub, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, and others. She’s been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She’s won the Maine Book Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence and has been a featured Tedx Speaker, where her talk the “Power of Story,” has been viewed widely. She’s taught at colleges and international art-residencies including Emerson College, Colby College, The University of Massachusetts, as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Fellow, The Haystack School, The Spannochia Foundation, La Napoule Foundation, and The Beijing Hutong. She’s on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program and is co-founder of the Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids in Portland, Maine.

 

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – MAINE AUTHOR DIDI COOPER

We are thrilled to welcome back to Graves Library, Maine Author, Didi Cooper to present her new book The Magic of Missing You on Sunday, March 14 at 2:00 pm.   Ms. Cooper will be interviewed by local bookshop owner Kristen Kuehnle before an audience of none.  Copies of the book are for sale at Bradbury’s Market, Daytrip Society, and Ms. Cooper’s website.  This program will be available for viewing on our Youtube channel and the Kennebunkport local access television.

Didi Cooper is an author living her best life on the coast of Maine. In love with the town of Kennebunkport, she brings the Earth magic she discovers to everything she does.  Didi stumbled unexpectedly into writing both women’s fiction and children’s books at the age of 48. Trained as a teacher and school administrator, Didi earned her doctorate in education in 2016. After 25 years in the field of education, she found herself yearning for a creative outlet; a hobby. She needed a departure from her type A, workaholic personality. She found herself yearning for the coast of Maine, where life was quieter, simpler, and perfectly magical.

The Pasco Lecture Series is supported by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library Snack Team.

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – GEORGE LONGSTRETH, MD – POSTPONED

We are thrilled to invite Maine Author George Longstreth to Graves Library for a Pasco Lecture on Sunday, May 17 at 2:00 pm.  Dr. Longstreth will be here to talk about his latest work You Call Me Angelo : The Godfather ‘s Been Shot in the John Pullman MD series  (published 11/2019)  

Here’s a bit:

The Godfather’s been shot, and surgeon John Pullman is on call. John’s troubles begin as the Mafia threatens him, his family, his associates and friends. Enter Steve, the nurse with strange ideas, who kills patients testing his cancer theories, and Al Townes, Head Trauma Nurse, who can kill quickly with his hands, but doesn’t. Will the Godfather’s personality ever be the same again? How many will Sal, the sub-boss of the Mafia Family kill before the Godfather returns to his right mind? Can John and Al survive Sal’s wrath? All these threatening problems come together as the surprise ending will leave the reader with a troubled smile. (Amazon.com)

 

Born and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, George B. Longstreth, MD earned his medical doctorate from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1965. Spending six years in New York City, first in Spanish Harlem, then in Hell’s Kitchen, he lived among many of the characters and events that he now uses in his novels. After a surgical stint in the US Navy, followed by ten years in rural northwest Connecticut, George and his wife Betsy enjoyed an active surgical practice in Fairfield during the 1980s and ’90s. This included on-call rotations to the Emergency Room at near-by Bridgeport Hospital, where an unhealthy sampling of the drug-world underbelly came for urgent care. Betsy and George now live in active retirement in Kennebunkport, Maine, where they are kept busy by family (including 19 grandchildren), friends, unusual characters and happenings, and a dog named Jane.

The Pasco Lecture Series is sponsored by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library Snack Team.  Sales and signing of You Call Me Angelo will follow the talk.  Please give us a call at 967-2778 with questions about this event or to find out what else is going on at Graves Library.  Doors open at 1:30 pm

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – BRUCE COFFIN -POSTPONED

Hopefully, we will be able to reschedule this program very soon.  We appreciate your patience and understanding.

We are thrilled to invite Maine Author Bruce Coffin to Graves Library for a Pasco Lecture on Sunday, April 26 at 2:00 pm.  Bruce will be here to talk about his latest work Within Plain Sight,  (published 2/4/2020) the latest gripping installment of the award-winning, #1 bestselling Detective Byron mystery series. 

Here’s a bit:

Amid the dog days of summer, Detective Sergeant John Byron is called to the scene of a horrific crime: a young woman’s body dismembered and left in an abandoned Portland lumber yard. The killing shares striking similarities with a spate of murders committed in Boston by a serial killer known only as the Horseman.

As Byron’s team investigates the case, they quickly push up against powerful forces in town. But Byron will stop at nothing to find the truth, not when there is a killer on the loose and everyone is a suspect. Has the Horseman expanded his killing field? Is this the work of in ingenious copycat-or is nothing as it seems? One thing is certain, Byron must uncover the truth before the killer strikes again.

Mr. Coffin is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He is a regular contributor to Murder Books blogs.  He lives and writes in Maine.

 

The Pasco Lecture Series is sponsored by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library Snack Team.  Sales and signing of Within Plain Sight will follow the talk.  Please give us a call at 967-2778 with questions about this event or to find out what else is going on at Graves Library.  Doors open at 1:30 pm

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – JAED COFFIN

We are thrilled to invite Maine Author Jaed Coffin to Graves Library for a Pasco Lecture on Sunday, March 8 at 2:00 pm. Mr. Coffin will be here to talk about his latest work, Roughhouse Friday, a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love.

While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in.

Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man—formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military—did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north.

Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor “the Savage,” invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of.  (MacMillan Publishers)

Jaed Coffin is also the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants. A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, his essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Nautilus, Jezebel, The Sun, and many other publications. He’s been a featured speaker at TEDx and Moth Radio Hour, as well as a guest at over twenty colleges and universities. Jaed teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters.

The Pasco Lecture Series is sponsored by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library Snack Team.  Sales and signing of Roughhouse Friday will follow the talk.  Please give us a call at 967-2778 with questions about this event or to find out what else is going on at Graves Library.  Doors open at 1:30 pm

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – WESLEY MCNAIR – POSTPONED

THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO A LATER DATE.  WE WILL HOPEFULLY BE ABLE TO RESUME ALL PROGRAMS SOON!

We are thrilled to invite Maine Author/Poet Wesley McNair back to Graves Library for a Pasco Lecture on Sunday, April 19 at 2:00 pm.  It’s been over a decade since he was last here!

 

Wesley McNair has been called by poet Philip Levine “one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” He is the author of ten volumes of poems and twenty books, including poetry, nonfiction, and edited anthologies. McNair has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller grants for study at the Bellagio Center in Italy, two NEA fellowships, and a United States Artist Fellowship as one of America’s “finest living artists.” He has twice been invited to read his poetry by the Library of Congress, and has served five times on the Pulitzer jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Other honors include the Robert Frost Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize, an Emmy Award, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, for his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters.” His poetry has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and 23 times on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in the Best American Poetry and over sixty anthologies and textbooks. In 2015 he was named as the recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry. His new book is The Unfastening.

 

The Pasco Lecture Series is sponsored by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library Snack Team.  Sales and signing of The Unfastening will follow the talk.  Please give us a call at 967-2778 with questions about this event or to find out what else is going on at Graves Library.  Doors open at 1:30 pm

PASCO LECTURE SERIES – DIDI COOPER (Author) AND HOLLY ROSS (Illust.)

We are thrilled to welcome Maine Author, Didi Cooper and Illustrator/Artist, Holly Ross, to present their new book  Before You Were Ours to the Pasco Lecture Series Sunday, September 29, 2019 at 2:00 pm.   Copies of the book will be for sale and signing.

Didi Cooper is an author living her best life on the coast of Maine. In love with the town of Kennebunkport, she brings the Earth magic she discovers to everything she does.  Didi stumbled unexpectedly into writing both women’s fiction and children’s books at the age of 48. Trained as a teacher and school administrator, Didi earned her doctorate in education in 2016. After 25 years in the field of education, she found herself yearning for a creative outlet; a hobby. She needed a departure from her type A, workaholic personality. She found herself yearning for the coast of Maine, where life was quieter, simpler, and perfectly magical.

Holly Ross is an artist living in Kennebunkport, Maine. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and has lived in Maine with her husband and two kids since 1993. She taught photography at Sanford High School and graphic design and drawing at Heartwood College of Art and River Tree Cen

The Pasco Lecture Series is supported by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Kennebunk Savings Bank, and the Graves Library Snack Team.