On Friday, September 13 at 5:00 pm, the Brattleboro Literary Festival invites you to join us for a Literary Cocktail Hour, online and free, featuring former Vermont State Poet Sydney Lea, author of new book "Now Look," which is a moving novel about second chances, missed chances, and redemption.

Set against a backdrop of the remote northern Maine wilderness, fishing, hunting, and the pleasures of outdoor life bring together a mismatched pair of friends—weaving back and forth between past and present, it follows the friendship of ivy-league educated George Mayes and semi-literate woodsman and logger Evan Butcher. Sydney Lea will also be reading from his latest poetry collection, What Shines?

SYDNEY LEA was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011-2015. In 2021, He received Vermont's highest artistic distinction, The Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2022, he published Seen from all Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, a collection of newspaper columns on poetry, composed during Lea's laureate tenure. A third edition of Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poets, an anthology he co-edited with Chard deNiord, his successor as state poet, is now available. His sixteenth collection of poems, What Shines?, was published in September 2023. In early 2024, his collection of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can, will appear,

In May, 2024, his second novel, Now Look was published. He lives in Newbury, Vermont.

Event Info

Sep 17, 2024, 4 to 6 PM

Sep 20, 2024, 7 to 8:30 PM

Sep 21, 2024, 9 AM to 4 PM