LEWISTON — Two award-winning New England poets will read from their work at Bates College on Thursday, Feb. 9. 

They are Dawn Potter, author of a prize-winning memoir and three poetry collections, and Meg Kearney, whose collection “Home by Now” won the 2010 Winship/PEN New England Award.

The free readings will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

A resident of Harmony, Potter is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, an annual summer gathering at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, N.H. Her most recent poetry collection is “How the Crimes Happened.”

Potter’s memoir, “Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton,” chronicles her project of copying out every word of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” while living in the Maine woods. “Tracing Paradise” won the 2010 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Potter’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner and other journals. She plays fiddle in the band String Field Theory.

The title poem of Kearney’s collection, “Home by Now,” is included in Garrison Keillor’s anthology “Good Poems: American Places.” Kearney previously published the poetry collection “An Unkindness of Ravens.”

Kearney is also the author of the 2005 teen novel, “The Secret of Me,” written in verse and journal entries. The sequel, “The Girl in the Mirror” is due out this month.

Kearney is founding director of the solstice low-residency master of fine arts in creative writing program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Previously, she was associate director of the National Book Foundation in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University.