While every month is poetry month at The Word Barn, it's fitting to wrap up National Poetry Month this year with three powerful voices -- Rebecca Hart Olander, Diana Whitney, and Abbie Kiefer -- who will fill the barn with their poems for us to take in and savor.
The reading will begin at 4 pm (doors at 3:30).
Can't wait to see you there!
See you on April 26!
The event is free ($5/person suggested donation), but we ask that you register to save yourself a spot.
ABOUT DIANA WHITNEY
Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry books, Wanting It, Dark Beds, and Girl Trouble. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.
ABOUT REBECCA HART OLANDER
Rebecca Hart Olander is a Women's National Book Association Poetry Award winner and the author of three poetry collections: Dressing the Wounds (a chapbook from dancing girl press, 2019), Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry and the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, and Singing from the Deep End (CavanKerry Press, 2026). Rebecca has taught writing at Amherst and Smith colleges, at Westfield State University, and through Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, and she works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.
ABOUT ABBIE KIEFER
Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024), a 2025 Julia Ward Howe Award Notable Book. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Atlantic, Copper Nickel, Image, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other places. She lives in New Hampshire and is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal.