Free Poetry Workshops for all ages to celebrate April as National Poetry Month

To celebrate National Poetry Month, free poetry workshops for both children and adults will be held on Saturday, April 5.  The workshop for children ages 9-12 years will be held 11:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m.; the workshop for teens and adults will be 12:30-2:30 p.m.

 Participants will write their own poems after discussing and answering questions about a major poem.The workshops will be taught by poet, professor and public lecturer Barbara Helfgott Hyett, who has published five collections of poetry and has a new book coming out soon. She is the recipient of two Massachusetts Artists Fellowships in poetry, the New England Poetry Club’s Gertrude Warren prize, a Brother John Fellowship for Excellence in the Arts, awarded by the Boston Foundation in 2009 and many other prizes and grants. Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies.Hyett has taught English at Harvard, MIT, Trinity College and Boston University, where she won the Sproat Award for Excellence in Teaching English. As a poet-in-the schools, she has served more than 200 communities and was artist-in-residence at the MFA and the Fuller Art Museums. Hyett is the director of PoemWorks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets in Brookline, which was named "One of the Best Workshops in Boston" by the Boston Globe.

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets throughout the United States come together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Sign up soon at the library for the free workshops — limited availability. 

Sponsored by the Friends of the Millis Public Library through a grant from the Millis Cultural Council.For more information, visit http://www.millislibrary.org/Millis/ or call the library at376-8282.