Conference on Poetry and Learning

July 5 – July 12

: for poets, educators, teaching artists, and other poetry advocates :

The driving force behind poems is a longing to communicate with our own kind.

—Dawn Potter, conference director

The Conference on Poetry & Learning invites poets, educators, and other poetry advocates to work intensely with their colleagues and a faculty of distinguished artists. The 2025 faculty features conference director Dawn Potter, associate director Teresa Carson, and visiting artists Gretchen Berg and Gwyneth Jones.

The conference will take place July 5–12, 2025. Over the course of the week, faculty and participants will share inspiring, effective techniques for teaching poetry, integrating it with other disciplines, and incorporating that power into their own writing practice and communities. We’ll consider poem generation, revision, and analysis as actual working poets do—an approach that also happens to align with curriculum standards for reading and writing. Sessions will include faculty and participant presentations, writing exercises, discussions and group work, as well as evening readings and performances by faculty and participants. Inservice teachers will earn 44 hours of professional development credit.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

—Henry David Thoreau

Meet the 2025 Faculty

Dawn Potter, Director

Dawn is the author or editor of nine books of prose and poetry, most recently the poetry collection Calendar. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, she has won a Maine Literary Award for nonfiction and has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writer’s Center, the Maine Arts Commission, and the American Rescue Plan, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review,  and many other journals. For more than a decade Dawn directed poetry and teaching programs at the Frost Place, and since 2019 she has led the high school studio writing program here at Monson Arts.

As a poet, Dawn is endlessly intrigued by the intersections of character and place. Lately she’s also been thinking a lot about the complexities of sound and cadence as well as the porous borders between form and free verse. Her primary goal as a teacher is to help writers become deeply attentive to their own voice, to pay ever closer attention to what they say and don’t say, and to use this search as a conduit into both inner revelation and a growing sense of community in the world.

Dawn lives in Portland, Maine, on a little city plot with a big garden.  Learn more about Dawn and her work here.

Teresa Carson, Associate Director

Teresa holds an MFA in poetry and an MFA in theater, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of six collections of poetry—most recently, Time Out of Joint (Deerbrook Editions, 2023). She lives in Florida, where she co-curates two programs aimed at fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations and putting art into public settings: The Unbroken Thread[s] Project and Art in Common Places.

For almost a decade, Teresa’s creative work has been focused on The Argument of Time quintet, sparked by a first visit, in 2014, to Ostia Antica, an extinct city outside of Rome. Each book connects to Ostia in some way, yet Ostia is not the subject of each book. Some of the themes that run through these poems include the human need to piece together unbroken narratives; the transformation of objects from one use (e.g., funerary object) to another (e.g., art object); the creative usefulness of getting lost; the power of uncertainty in our lives and our creative work.

Learn more about Teresa and her work here.

Meet Our 2025 Visiting Artists

Gretchen Berg is a performance artist/educator and poet. She has taught at Bowdoin College, Bates College, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has created hundreds of collaborative performances with students and teachers in public schools throughout Maine. After twenty years of performing original material with Portland’s modern dance company Berg, Jones & Sarvis, Gretchen continues to focus on creating new physical theater performances and writing poetry. She is the author of the poetry collection So Far (2022) and is working on a second manuscript.

Gwyneth Jones teaches modern dance technique, repertory, and choreography at Bowdoin College. She has danced professionally with Dan Wagoner and Dancers, Berg, Jones & Sarvis, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, and the Ram Island Dance Company and was awarded a Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. She also served as a guest artist and company teacher at London Contemporary Dance Theatre and as the choreographic consultant to the playwright and director Richard Nelson for his production of The Michaels at the Public Theater and Hunter College in New York City (named a New York Times Critic’s Pick in 2019) and What Happened? The Michaels Abroad (a New York Times Best Theater Pick in 2021).

Gretchen and Gwyneth live in Portland, Maine, where they teach and make work together. That has included collaborating with multigenerational community dancers and Portland Sea Dogs players to create and perform The Dance of the Seadogs in front of 7,000 baseball (and modern dance) fans at Hadlock Field. They also made a dance that was performed on the steps of Portland City Hall (featuring the chief of police, a local TV weatherman, and city workers) and collaborated with the visual artist Kate Beck to perform Modern Structure:100 Drawings,100 Gestures at the Portland Museum of Art.

Lodging and Meals

Monson Arts offers on-campus housing in a private (single) or double (shared with one other person) room in a house with shared bathroom and kitchen. Houses are comfortably furnished with linens provided. If you do not need housing, you may register as a day student and pay only for meals. All meals are prepared by the The Quarry, a fine-dining restaurant in downtown Monson and recent James Beard award winner.

Dates and Costs

Conference on Poetry & Learning: Arrive Saturday July 5th for Dinner – Depart Saturday July 12th after lunch. Six and a half days of workshop time.

Room and board:

• • Single room = $1,990
  • Double room = $1,710
  • Meals only = $1,430 (For those who do not need accommodations)

We will have a few scholarships available. To apply for financial aid, please email Dawn Potter.

Participants are welcome to bring along nonparticipating partners. Please email Chantal Harris for further information.

Deposit of $800 due now with the final payment processed by May 15th.