You are Invited to Attend…
Wednesday, May 14th 2025
5:30pm - 7:00pm
At the home of Meg & Rob Adams
395 Spring Street
Portland, ME
Join us to learn more about how creative expression changes our communities for the better and equips youth for success both now and in the future.
Celebrate the power of youth voices and connect with Maine authors:
Samaa Abdurraqib
Samaa Abdurraqib (she/her) is a poet and a newly minted Maine Master Naturalist. Recently, her poetry can be found in Cider Press Review, december, and Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. She’s the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (2023). Her chapbook, Towards a Retreat will be published by Diode Editions in 2025. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Maine Humanities Council.
Tanuja Desai Hidier
Author/singer-songwriter and Telling Room Board President Tanuja Desai Hidier has been a (delighted!) Mainer since 2018: via a Boston birth, Bombay babyhood, and years in New England, NYC, Paris, and London, UK—the latter where her books’ protagonist Dimple Lala materialized. Born Confused, Tanuja’s pioneering debut, considered to be the first South Asian American YA novel, was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Sequel Bombay Blues received the South Asia Book Award. Tanuja has made albums of original songs based on the novels, and produced the DeepBlueShe #Mutiny2Unity music video/PSA, featuring 100+ artist/activists. Her prose-poem “Sooji Sakar Badam Ghee” is included in PEN America’s India At 75, a historic collection reflecting on India’s 75th year of Independence. Personal narrative, “A Recipe for Love; Accompaniments for Grief” is a 2024 Maine Literary Awards finalist. Tanuja wrote the foreword to Untold: Defining Moments of the Uprooted, a nonfiction anthology featuring 32 new Brown womxn writers. Her short stories appear in various anthologies as well. The latest, “Rakhi & Roll”, is included in HarperTeen’s Home Has No Borders, out this May. Maine, on Wabanaki land, is where Tanuja lives, loves, and sometimes lakes. And everywhere is where she knows all our stories shape, make—and save—lives. Telling Room forever!
Meredith McCarroll
Meredith McCarroll is a writer and educator living in Portland. McCarroll earned her PhD in African-American Literature and Film from University of Tennessee, where she focused on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies. She worked as Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College for eight years before launching Dogwood Writing and Editing. She is author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (2018) and co-editor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, which won the American Book Award in 2019. She is a frequent instructor of nonfiction at Maine Writers and Publishers. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Guardian, CNN, New Lines Magazine, Still, Salvation South, and elsewhere. She has volunteered at The Telling Room as a mentor in the Young Writers and Leaders Program and in the classroom. She is also a dancer, yoga teacher, and enthusiastic hiker.
Mira Ptacin
Mira Ptacin is a literary journalist, memoirist, ghostwriter, editor, and professor of creative writing. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul and of The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna. Her writing has appeared in The Atavist, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Vogue, Poets & Writers, Harper’s, Tin House, Lit Hub, Longreads, Down East, and other publications. She lives on Peaks Island, Maine, and is currently at work on her next book.
Rebecca Turkewitz
Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press), which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award and named one of Debutiful’s Best Debuts of 2023. Her fiction and humor have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, Best Microfiction 2023 and 2024, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She loves cats, the ocean, and ghost stories.