An Evening with Winifred Hughes and Diane Macklin

Bird in Hand is delighted to host Winifred Hughes and Diane Macklin for an evening of poetry and conversation!

Hughes' new poetry collection THE VILLAGE OF NEW GHOSTS, won the won the 2024 Henry Morgenthau III First Book Poetry Prize for a Writer Over 70, which is facilitated by Passager Books, a Baltimore-based press.

Both Hughes and Macklin are bold and incisive in their work and are sure to treat us with a dynamic conversation.

Click here to order THE VILLAGE OF NEW GHOSTS!

Winifred (Winnie) Hughes is a reformed academic and active birder living in Princeton, NJ. Winnie comes from a “whole family of scribblers”: her mother Josephine Nicholls Hughes was a poet, her father Riley Hughes, a novelist, and her three siblings, all writers, including her sister Hildred Crill, a poet who lives in Stockholm. Currently she teaches nature writing and ecopoetry at the Watershed Institute in Pennington, NJ, and leads many bird walks in the local open spaces. She is author of two prize-winning chapbooks, Frost Flowers (2019) and Nine-Bend Bridge (2015). Her first full-length collection, The Village of New Ghosts, won the 2024 Henry Morgenthau III First Book Poetry Prize for a Writer Over 70. Grace Cavalieri, Morgenthau judge and former Maryland Poet Laureate, said about the book: “Someone is obviously in charge of this work. Someone is in control of its precise syntax and beautiful heart. I never wanted to stop reading.”

Winnie is a longtime member of U.S. 1 Poets Cooperative, established in the 70s, dedicated to fostering new poets. She was married to the late Fred Spar.

Diane Macklin is a poet, storyteller and teaching artist in the MD/DC/VA area. In 2000 she was called beyond the classroom into the ancient art of storytelling. Her life and work are centered around "making a difference, one story at a time." Featured this month in The Baltimore Beacon, Diane said that after her mother died in car accident she decided she needed to step out of her comfort zone. "I wanted to live as boldly as my mother . . . there were places that I lived in fear and one of them was putting my writing out in public."

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