2026 Peggy L. Osher Visiting Artist Fellow Lecture: Summer J. Hart

Thursday, October 8th, 5 PM - 7 PM

McGoldrick Center Salons, 2nd Floor, University of Southern Maine (Portland Campus)

5 - 5:30 PM: Reception

5:30 PM - 7 PM: Lecture, Reading, and Q&A, followed by a book signing.

Award-winning writer and interdisciplinary artist Summer J. Hart will deliver a poetry reading and artist process talk weaving together recent works on grief, memory-mapping, and the passage of time. A book signing for her new book of poetry What Came Down in the Smoke will follow the reading and lecture. This event is hosted by the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at USM, and is also part of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2026 Maine Lit Fest. The event is free and open to the public.

Author: Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of two books of poetry: Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), which won the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and What Came Down in the Smoke (2026, JackLeg Press). She is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the 2022 Hellen Ingram Plummer Fellow at MacDowell. Her creative work has been supported by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Vermont Studio Center. Her writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press); Mothman Was Here: Tales of the Uncanny (Tenpenny Books, 2024); Allium; Ballast; Bedfellows, Electric Literature, Grist, Hypertext Review, Heavy Feather Review, North American Review, Tyger Quarterly, Wildroof Journal, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media artworks have been featured in exhibitions across the United States including SPRING/BREAK NYC, Pen + Brush, The Parsonage, the Maine State House Gallery, Gitana Rosa Gallery, LeMieux Galleries, and Kasia Kay Art Projects. She has work in the permanent collections of The University of Hartford and the University of Southern Maine. Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.