Doors open at 4:30pm
Event begins at 5:00pm
Join The Telling Room’s 2025 Young Emerging Authors Fellows as they celebrate their book launch at SPACE. Authors Beetle Samuel Rooke-Dutton, Ramona Rowe, Sophia Tyutyunnyk, and Ruby Van Dyk took part in a fifteen-month fellowship with The Telling Room to write, revise, and publish their books with support from professional authors and writing mentors. This event is free and open to the public.
These forthcoming books include poetry exploring food and food systems, a sci-fi novel full of android adventures, poetry about roadkill and natural decomposition, and a young Ukrainian-American’s memoir on her experiences during the final stages of her family’s path from Ukraine to legal residency in the United States. Meet The Telling Room’s authors for an evening of poetry and prose as we celebrate these promising young voices in Maine’s literary community. This event is free and open to the public, with books available for purchase.
About the Authors:
Beetle Samuel Rooke-Dutton (he/him/his) is a trans guy from California who currently lives in a beach town in southern Maine. Deer, Silent and Open-Eyed is his first published collection of poetry, though he has been writing for over ten years. When not writing, Beetle is active in Maine’s queer youth community, running workshops that work to create safe spaces and improve the accessibility of communities. He also enjoys linguistics, photography, and the outdoors, especially when hiking or on bike trips. Though Beetle plans to eventually move away, Maine is his home, and he is forever grateful for the community he has gained because of that.
Ramona Rowe is a junior at Portland High School with a love of bad sci-fi, ridiculous fantasy, and her irritating cats. When not writing, she’s drawing supervillains and space aliens or scrolling through Wikipedia to learn everything about everything. Or if not everything, electrolarynxes, Star Wars, and Providence, Rhode Island. Factory Town is based on her love of science fiction and her family experiences in Worcester (which have always included less explosions and more Vietnamese food).
Sophia Tyutyunnyk wrote Candle on the Tree as a sophomore at Orono High School in Orono, Maine. Her coming-of-age memoir is about accompanying her parents to Kyiv, Ukraine, as they finalized their journey to legal permanent residency in the United States. In 2023, Sophia won The Telling Room's Writing Contest for Penobscot County. Other than writing, Sophia enjoys playing soccer, swimming competitively, listening to music, and traveling with her family. In the future, Sophia hopes to go into STEM and write more books.
Ruby Van Dyk is a poet from many places, including North Carolina, Singapore, and Maine. She wrote her debut poetry collection Clearing Out the Fridge through The Telling Room’s Young Emerging Authors fellowship. A recent graduate of Casco Bay High School, she is attending Stanford University to study sustainability and policy. She is deeply invested in the future of our food system and our climate, and hopes to help in working toward a solution. In her free time she likes to take long walks, cook without recipes, and watch movies at her local theater.
Sophia Tyutyunnyk