Megan Grumbling collection, 2016

Full finding aid (pdf)

Collection Scope and Content

The collection contains a program from Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, as well as a press release from the University of North Texas.

Biographical/Historical Note

Megan Grumbling (born 1976) writes poetry, criticism and essays, and dramatic works, and serves as an editor, teacher, and writing mentor. Her collection Booker’s Point, awarded the Vassar Miller Prize and the Maine Book Award for Poetry, was released by the University of North Texas Press in 2016. Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Award from the Robert Frost Foundation, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has been included in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Verse Daily.

Megan is the librettist of the spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, a co-creation with the late composer Denis Nye, which had its world premiere production by Hinge/Works Modern Opera in 2016 at SPACE Gallery, in Portland, Maine. Megan also wrote and co-directed the short film Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production; she has written and directed interactive street theater for the sea level rise consciousness-raising group King Tide Party; and her dramatic and operatic work as co-founder of Hinge/Works has been staged as part of the PortFringe Festival, the Sacred and Profane Festival, and the Belfast Poetry Festival.

Megan serves as Reviews Editor for The Café Review, a poetry and arts journal, and has since 2004 written weekly theater criticism for the Portland Phoenix. She teaches at the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, frequently leads writing workshops and tutorials, and delivers manuscript consultations and editing work to a range of authors. She earned a master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University’s School of Journalism, and studied oral history, ethnography, and American studies as an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College.

Megan’s work is strongly influenced by stories, history, documentary modes, and the natural world. She has written a portrait-in-verse of an old Maine woodsman; explored the significance of gold in America through the voices of three historical figures; and contemplated how we inhabit the vessels of a neighborhood, a body, and the deep and precarious blue.