Dawn Potter
Director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching
Kerrin McCadden Associate Director of The Conference on Poetry and Teaching Teresa Carson, Writing Intensive Leader BJ Ward, Faculty at The Conference on Poetry and Teaching Nathan McClain, Faculty at The Conference on Poetry and Teaching
About the Faculty
Dawn Potter directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, held each summer at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire. In addition, she leads the high school writing program at Monson Arts, co-directs the Kauffmann Summer Writing Seminar, and occasionally offers online poetry and nonfiction classes through 24PearlStreet. When not teaching, she works as a manuscript consultant and as a freelance editor for literary and academic presses.
Dawn was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series. She is the author or editor of eight books of prose and poetry–most recently, the poetry collection Chestnut Ridge (2019). Her memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, won the 2010 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction, and she has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writer’s Center, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals in the United States and abroad.
Dawn lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband, the photographer Thomas Birtwistle.
Kerrin McCadden is the author of American Wake (forthcoming from Black Sparrow Press), Keep This to Yourself, winner of the Button Poetry Prize, and Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is Associate Poetry Editor at Persea Press. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
Teresa Carson’s work centers on the themes of time, memory, and the stories we humans tell.
She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Elegy for a Floater (CavanKerry Press, 2008); My Crooked House (CavanKerry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Congress of Human Oddities (Deerbrook Editions, 2015); and Visit to an Extinct City (Deerbrook Editions, 2021).
She lives in Florida, where so co-curates two programs aimed at fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations and putting art into public settings: The Unbroken Thread[s] Project and Art in Common Places. She frequently contributes her ideas about poetry on the CavanKerry Press blog and in a weekly “poem blast” la poesia della settimana
BJ Ward is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems 1990-2013 (North Atlantic Books), which received the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence.
His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The New York Times, and The Sun, among others, and have been featured on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” NJTV’s “State of the Arts,” and the website Poetry Daily.
He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and two Distinguished Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. One of his poems (“For the Children of the World Trade Center Victims”) has been cast in bronze and acquired as part of the permanent collection at Grounds for Sculpture.
He co-directs the A.F.A. in Creative Writing program at Warren Community College and has recently served as a guest lecturer in Creative Writing at Lafayette College (2019) and DeSales University (2020).
Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Previously, he taught creative writing at Seton Hall, Drew University, and St. Joseph’s College, as well as poetry workshops for the Cave Canem Foundation. His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New York Times Magazine, upstreet, American Poets, The Rumpus, and Hunger Mountain, among others. He currently lives in Brooklyn.