In the poem “Trees,” Cheryl Savageau writes of her father, “...I have seen you get out of a car, / breathe in the sky, the green / of summer maples, listen for the talk / of birds and squirrels, the murmur / of earthworms beneath your feet.” 

On Wednesday, September 29, at 7PM, live via Zoom, join Cook Memorial Library and Chocorua Lake Conservancy for “Poetry and the Land,” a reading and conversation with poet Cheryl Savageau. Savageau’s poems draw on her Abenaki and French heritage, and her deep roots in the Granite State—Abenaki land since time immemorial. She writes with beauty and the specificity born of attention and love about places familiar to those of us who spend time in this region, about home, family, connection to place, lineage, and the complexities of history. If you’d like to read her work before this presentation, you can find copies of her collections Dirt Road Home and Mother/Land at the Cook Library in Tamworth. Please register below.

Cheryl Savageau is the author of the memoir Out of the Crazywoods and the poetry collections, Dirt Road Home, which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Mother/Land, which has been described as “one of the best literary depictions of New England to date.” (Craig Womack, author of Red on Red). Her children’s book, Muskrat Will Be Swimming was a Smithsonian Notable Book and won the Skipping Stones Book Award for Exceptional Multicultural and Ecology and Nature Books. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Arts Foundation. She has been a mentor to Native American writers through Gedakina and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and received their Mentor of the Year award in 1999. She is former editor of Dawnland Voices, 2.0, an online journal of literary work from Native people of New England and the Maritimes. Cheryl Savageau teaches at the Middlebury Breadloaf School of English.

This program is part of “Wabanaki History, Ecology & Experiences,” a series of programs exploring Indigenous history and experiences in what is now called northern New England, a collaboration between the Cook Memorial Library in Tamworth and the Chocorua Lake Conservancy, made possible through a generous grant from The Tamworth Foundation.

Banner image: Along the Kancamagus. Photo by Michael Browning on Unsplash