Nantucket Poetry Festival: 2026 Poets
A woman with curly gray hair wearing a white button-down shirt and dark jeans standing outdoors with a blurred background of trees.

M.E. Redmond

Mary Ellen Redmond's poems have appeared in The Drunken Boat, Free State Review, Comstock Review, Cape Cod Review, Rattle, One Art, Orchards Poetry Journal, and The Cortland Review.  A former slam poet, she represented Cape Cod at the National Poetry Slam Competition in Providence, RI. She has been featured twice on WCAI's Poetry Sunday and her interview with poet Gregory Orr was featured in The Drunken Boat. Her poem "Fifty-Six Days" earned a Best of the Net nomination in 2016 and "Joy is not made to be a crumb" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024.

Related Events: 2026 Program

Find M. E. Redmond at the events listed below. View the full 2026 itinerary here.

Opening Night: Poetry from the Archives | Thursday, August 27th | Quaker Meeting House, 4 - 6 pm

Poetry Market! at the Nantucket Farmers & Artisans Market | Saturday, August 29th | Cambridge St. — Farmers & Artisans Market, 9 am - 1 pm

Visiting Poet Reading: Mary Ellen Redmond and John Bonanni | Sunday, August 30th | Mitchell’s Book Corner, 4:30 - 5:30 pm

Closing Night: Reading & Open Mic at the Atheneum | Sunday August 30th | 1 India Street — Nantucket Atheneum — Great Hall 2nd floor, 7:30 pm reading & 8:30 pm open mic

Books Featured at the Festival

Book cover for 'The Ocean Effect' by Mary Ellen Redmond, featuring a beach with sand, waves, and a partly cloudy sky.

The Ocean Effect

“The poems in Mary Ellen Redmond’s The Ocean Effect remind us of the necessity of stillness in a world of rupture and disjuncture. Here, the mind of the poet ranges over the sandy edges of shores and tidal marshes, through personal history, the detritus of dreams and the scarred heart we all carry, and distills image and thought and music into poems of great delicacy and sharp insight.The Ocean Effect is a work of depth, maturity and a lively enduring beauty.”

— Mark Wunderlich

Finishing Line Press, 2014

Drawing of a teenage boy sitting at a desk with his head resting on his hand, wearing a hoodie. Overlaid text reads "I HAVE ONE STUDENT" and "MARY ELLEN REDMOND".

I Have One Student

“This book is a love letter to teachers. Every poem either brought back a memory from my own classroom of a specific student, or a specific event, or reminded me of an old poem I wrote, or one I should have written, or (worst of all) a poem I now can no longer write because Mary Ellen Redmond beat me to it.”

—Taylor Mali, author of What Teachers Make

Finishing Line Press, 2026