FARMINGTON —The University of Maine at Farmington’s celebrated Visiting Writers Series is excited to present current poet laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Diannely Antigua, as the popular program’s fourth reader of the 2023/24 season.

Antigua will read from her work at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 7, 2024, in The Landing in the UMF Olsen Student Center. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing with the author.

Antigua’s debut poetry collection “Ugly Music” (YesYes Book, 2019) is an homage to the mundane beauty and pain of everyday life. Structured like a song, the collection grapples with reality, dreams, trauma, and obsession. Ugly Music is the winner of the 2020 Whiting Award and the Pamet River Prize.

The Whiting Award selection committee writes “For Diannely Antigua, the body is a site of trauma and awe; it is at once magical and damaged. Antigua’s poems layer lyricism, religious language, and the tactile materials of daily life to build altars of affection for the people and things of her world.”

Poet Catherine Barnett writes of Antigua’s collection, “Antigua’s seduction is both intellectual and physical, a force strong enough to counter the emotional pains recounted here—an abandoning father, trespassed bodies, pregnancies lost, wanted, feared . . .”

Antigua’s second poetry collection “Good Monster” is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Adriot Journal, and the Indiana Review, among others. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet.

“Ugly Music” is available for pre-purchase UMF University Store and Devany, Doak, and Garret Booksellers.

The Visiting Writer Series is sponsored by the UMF Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program.

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