The Literary Cocktail Hour is an fun, informal monthly event featuring a pair (or more) of speakers in an entertaining, illuminating virtual event based on the notion of a cocktail hour.
Former Poet Laureate of Vermont
Sydney Lea
Friday, September 13 at 5:00 pm
Online and free!
register at
On Friday, September 13, the Brattleboro Literary Festival will present Sydney Lea, former Poet Laureate of Vermont and author many books, including his 16th collection of poetry, What Shines? and a new novel, Now Look.
“Life isn’t easy, and we’re all scarred, traumatized to some degree. What is to be done? Lea responds in illuminating verse that expresses a reckoning with emotions that linger like ghosts in the bardo, hesitant to move on, having one more thing to say…This radiant collection will leave readers counting their blessings past, to come, and most certainly right here.”
—Booklist
Set against a backdrop of the remote northern Maine wilderness, fishing, hunting, and the pleasures of outdoor life bring together a mismatched pair of friends In this new novel.
SYDNEY LEA was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011-2015. In 2021, He received Vermont’s highest artistic distinction, The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2022, he published Seen from all Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, a collection of newspaper columns on poetry, composed during Lea’s laureate tenure. A third edition of Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poets, an anthology he co-edited with Chard deNiord, his successor as state poet, is now available. His sixteenth collection of poems– What Shines?– was published in September 2023. In early 2024, his collection of personal essays, Such Dancing as I Can, will appear, and later in the year, his second novel, Now Look.
Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. Of his twelve previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound was one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, won the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner, soon to be re-issued in paper by Red Hen Press. The author’s longtime fascination with upper New England and its vanishing traditions is recorded in A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, and is active both in literacy efforts (Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, Inc.) and in conservation (Downeast Lakes Land Trust).
