In celebration of National Poetry Month, and Seamus Heaney’s birthday, we will be hosting an evening of poetry readings featuring three extraordinary Maine poets: Robert Breen, Maya Stein, and Jeffrey Thomson.

Doors open at 6:30 PM, and readings begin at 7:00 PM. Admission is free. Donations in support of the Maine Irish Heritage Center are welcome. A cash bar is available. Head to maineirish.com now to learn more or RSVP.

Robert Breen is the author of Undertow: A Tide Pool of Poems and The Shore Digger. His poems have been published in Harvard Summer Review, The Café Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and Communion Arts Journal. His awards include the Joy of the Pen and the Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award from the Topsham Public Library. His correspondence with Seamus Heaney resides at Emory University’s Rose Library. A Boston native and retired Boston firefighter, he has a BS from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and attended the summer writing program at Harvard University. He lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Karen.

Maya Stein is a ninja poet, writing guide, creative adventuress, and current Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine. She wrote her first poem, “Papa Tree and the Seasons,” when she was 9 years old and has been a freelance writer and editor for more than 20 years. She has self-published five books and a handful of writing prompt booklets, including “Grief Becomes You,” a collection of writings and photographs on the subject of loss from more than 60 contributors, and “The Poser: 38 Portraits Reimagined,” a full-color coffee table book of contemporary portrait re-enactments. She facilitates workshops and retreats—live and online—and works one-on-one with people interested in deepening their creative practice and bringing new work to fruition.

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of ten books, including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory and Half/Life: New and Selected Poems from Alice James Books, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.