Poet Suzanne S. Rancourt reads at the Rangeley Public Library on Saturday, August 3rd, at 3:30 p.m. 17th annual Hugh Ogden Memorial Poetry Gathering. Free. All Welcome. Bill Schaaf

On Saturday, August 3rd, lovers of poetry will gather at 3:30 p.m. in the Rangeley Public Library to honor poet Hugh Ogden (1937-2006), formerly of Poets’ Island, Rangeley. Suzanne S. Rancourt will be the featured poet at the 17th annual Hugh Ogden Memorial Poetry Gathering. Sponsored by the Rangeley Public Library and the Ogden Poetry Committee, the event is free to all. Light refreshments will be served.
Members of the Ogden family will begin the Gathering by reading poems written by their father. Then, community members are invited to read a poem of Hugh’s or one of their own that attends to what meant so much to Hugh: the beauty and mystery of the world, especially Rangeley, and peace among all living things. A sign-up sheet will be available just before the start of the evening, since time will be limited.
Poet and writer Suzanne S. Rancourt’s roots reach deep into western Maine. Born in Farmington, she grew up in Temple and received degrees from the University of Maine at Farmington. She dedicated her 2021 book, Old Stones, New Roads (Main Street Rag Publishers) to her paternal grandmother, Alice Pearl Stewart, who worked in logging camps around Rangeley and who told Suzanne the stories of where each stone came from that she used to build the hearth at the camp on Porter Lake. As interviewer Larry Abbott has written, Suzanne’s poems “create a braid of the natural world and the human world, memory and the present, and myth and history.”
Of Abenaki, Huron, Québécois, and Scottish descent, Suzanne is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army. Her other books include Songs of Archilochus (Unsolicited Press, 2023); murmurs at the gate (Unsolicited Press, 2019), winner of the 2023 Poetry of Modern Conflict Award; and Billboard in the Clouds (Curbstone Books, 2004), awarded the Native Writers First Book Award. Her poetry, non-fiction, and fiction have appeared in a host of journals and magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Press Native Voices Anthology, Journal of Military Experience, and Callaloo. She was the May 2022 and 2023 guest artist at University of Michigan’s New England Literature Program, and she served as the featured writer for the Sundog Poetry Center’s Vermont event honoring the People of the Dawnland: Voices of Today and Tomorrow.
Suzanne a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from Vermont College and a Master of Science in Educational Psychology from SUNY Albany. She is also an Expressive Arts Therapist with degrees in psychology and writing, as well as credentials in Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counseling, Aikido, and Iaido. She works within the Veteran Community as a Veteran Peer Mentor in Saratoga County and has twice been the keynote speaker at the Maine Military & Community Network conference. She lives in Hadley, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains.
To purchase copies of Suzanne’s books, please visit Books, Lines & Thinkers, 2513 Main Street, Rangeley (864-4355). To read some of Suzanne’s poems, visit her website: https://www.expressive-arts.com/Artists–Page.html
Respect for Maine’s natural world and for one’s ancestors link Suzanne Rancourt and Hugh Ogden; please join us to celebrate their poetry. If you can, please call the Rangeley Public Library at 864-5529 to reserve a seat and help us plan for the event. FMI contact Peggy at 864-3421 (myocomATgmu.edu) and visit   http://margaretyocom.com/poetry holds