FARMINGTON — Poets Stuart Kestenbaum and Wesley McNair will offer a shared reading of their poems at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, at the Emery Community Arts Center on the University of Maine at Farmington campus.

The reading is sponsored by the Arts Institute of Western Maine. It will be followed by a reception and book-signing.

McNair served as Maine poet laureate from 2011-16, and Kestenbaum was appointed to that role in April.

McNair is the author of 10 volumes of poems and 20 books, including poetry, nonfiction and edited anthologies. He edited the weekly newspaper column “Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry” from 2011-15. He also led 2015’s Maine Poetry Express, a whistle-stop tour of community readings and discussions about poetry in everyday life.

He’s received grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller grants for study at the Bellagio Center in Italy, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a United States Artist Fellowship. He has twice been invited to read his poetry by the Library of Congress, and has served four 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. His poetry has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” and 22 times on “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor. Last year, he was named the recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence for his collection “The Lost Child: Ozark Poems.”

Kestenbaum is the author of four collections of poems: “Pilgrimage,” “House of Thanksgiving,” “Prayers and Run-on Sentences” and “Only Now.” He also authored a collection of essays in “The View From Here.”

He served as director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. Before that, he worked at the Maine Arts Commission and the Children’s Museum of Maine.

He remains active in the field of craft, as chairman of the American Craft Council and as a strategist for a consortium of crafts schools across the country, including Haystack. He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writings have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and on “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor.

Kestenbaum is Maine’s fifth poet laureate, a position established by the Legislature in 1995. The role doesn’t have specific duties beyond broadening understanding and appreciation for poetry. The position is an unpaid, honorary post.