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LEWISTON — Lewiston’s Franco-American Collection will host poet Steven Riel on Monday, Feb. 24. Riel is the third featured writer of the FAC’s five Meet-A-Franco-Author programs being offered free of charge to the area’s Francophiles and lovers of fine writing in 2019-20.
The program is 7 p.m. in room 170 at Lewiston-Auburn College of the University of Southern Maine, Westminster Street.
Writers in the program series, Franco-America at the Interstice of Identities, explore the conjunction of their Franco identity with another identity that is also important to them.
“Steven Riel writes implicated poetry that features both his Franco heritage and his gay identity,” said Franco-American Collection Program Chair and Board Member Denis Ledoux. “His poems give voice to the Franco-American community of his childhood, its narrative of survival and assimilation, and its uncomfortable relationship to homosexuality. His work also honors and attends closely to the history and culture of both communities that have shaped him and continue to shape him.”
Raised in Monson, Mass., Riel is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, “Fellow Odd Fellow” (Trio House, 2014), as well as three chapbooks, including most recently, “Postcard from P-town,” which was selected as runnerup for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize and published by Seven Kitchens Press. His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including “Lives in Translation,” by Soleil Press and in numerous periodicals, including The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. The Lambda Literary Foundation selected him as a 2016 fellow.
Poetry editor of RFD Magazine from 1987 to 1995, he currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Franco-American literary e-journal Résonance. He received an MFA in Poetry from New England College where he was the recipient of a Joel Oppenheimer Scholarship and was the 2005 Robert Fraser Distinguished Visiting Poet at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania.
Ledoux said, “Our Meet-A-Franco-Author programs depart from previous Franco-American Collection curatorial focus. With this series, the FAC steps into the creative present all the while continuing to maintain and enhance our role as keepers of Franco stories for future generations.” There is also a question and answer session, “so that the audience will have time to engage in conversation with Steven Riel about his experience as a Franco and as a gay man,” said Ledoux.
The Meet-A-Franco-Author programs are free of charge, with support from a grant from the Québec Delegation in Boston, and are open to the public. Members of the FAC are invited to attend a prereading reception with the author. For information on becoming a member, contact the office at 207-753-6545.
The next program is scheduled for Monday, March 23, and will feature Maine fiction writer, Ron Currie Jr.; historian David Vermette will speak April 27.
