Celebrate NH’s little-known state holiday, Robert Frost Day, at the Frost Place!
Fifty years ago, the Town of Franconia purchased Robert Frost’s former farmhouse to preserve this literary landmark, and the next summer, The Frost Place came to life as a historic house museum and center for poetry and the arts. Through the years, the Frost Place has built a vibrant community united by a shared love of poetry and a commitment to sustaining its legacy. We invite you to celebrate Frost Day at Frost’s Franconia farmhouse!
Writing Workshop
Our 1998 Poet-in-Residence, Sue Ellen Thompson, returns to the Frost Place! All are invited to participate in a short, generative writing session at 1:30 pm. Sue Ellen will offer prompts and a chance to discuss our writing. You’ll come away with a short poem and many ideas for more! No experience is necessary.
Reading Series
Join us in the historic Henry Holt Barn at the Frost Place for an afternoon reading series, featuring our guests of honor, past and present resident poets, Sue Ellen Thompson (1998), Major Jackson (2004), and Adam Giannelli (2026). Freya Wheeler, Franconia’s own rising young poet, will open the reading.
Meet the Poets
Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems.
His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. Read more at: https://www.majorjackson.com/
Sue Ellen Thompson
Sue Ellen Thompson’s poems have been read more than a dozen times on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor, have been featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column, and have received numerous awards, including the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, the 2003 Pablo Neruda Prize, and two Individual Artist’s Grants from the State of Connecticut. She is the author of six books, most recently Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems (Grayson Books, 2022), They (Turning Point Books, 2014), and The Golden Hour (Autumn House, 2006), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1st edition), a selection from the work of 94 American poets that is used in college classrooms across the country.”
Sue Ellen has taught poetry at Middlebury College, Wesleyan University, Binghamton University, Central Connecticut State University and the University of Delaware. She has given readings throughout New England, as well as at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and Galway University in Ireland. She was the 1998 poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH , and spent 13 summers at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.
After living in Mystic, CT, for most of her adult life, Thompson moved in late 2006 to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. She is now teaching at The Writers’ Center in Bethesda and mentoring adult poets. In 2010, the Maryland Library Association selected her as the winner of its prestigious Maryland Author Award, which is given to a poet every four years for his or her body of work. Read more: https://sueellenthompson.com/
Adam Giannelli
Adam Giannelli is the author of Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; the translator of Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012), a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio; and the editor of High Lonesome (Oberlin College Press, 2006), a collection
of essays on Charles Wright. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, New Criterion, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from several institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Program, James Merrill House, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell. He has taught at Oberlin College, Hamilton College, Colby College, and Purdue University. For more information, visit adamgiannelli.com.