Word Festival lineup announced, includes oral history recordings
Blue Hill’s annual writing festival to feature award-winning authors and ‘especially strong’ poetry program
Sept. 28, 2026
By Steele Hays
BLUE HILL–The 2026 Blue Hill’s Word Festival will feature three award-winning authors in key speaking slots and a “poetry crawl” in multiple locations when the annual literary event is held Oct. 22-25.
Michelle Young, author of The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, will be the keynote speaker on Saturday evening, Oct. 24. The novel was named a Best Book of 2025 by the New York Public Library and Library Journal.
On Friday evening, Ben Shattuck and Kelly Link will share the stage. Shattuck’s latest short story collection, The History of Sound, features 12 stories set in Maine and other New England locations, and was the basis for a 2025 feature film with the same title. The book won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Kelly Link’s short story collection, Get in Trouble, was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and her first novel, The Book of Love, won the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Pulitzer Committee praised Link as “a writer with a fertile and often fabulist imagination [who] explores inner lies and odd corners of reality.” Link won a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 2018.
Sarah Pebworth, chair of Word’s Steering Committee, said the festival’s poetry program “is especially strong this year.”
Among the poets who will appear are Maine Poet Laureate Dawn Potter as well as Moon Macher, Maya Stein, Gibson Fay-Leblanc and former Maine Poet Laureate and Deer Isle resident Stuart Kestenbaum.
A “poetry crawl” will take place in downtown Blue Hill, and a kids’ program on Dungeons and Dragons is also being offered. The full schedule and list of Word Festival 2026 events is available here.
Word was founded in 2017 by a group of local residents who wanted to celebrate Blue Hill’s rich literary culture and traditions. To help celebrate the tenth edition of the event, organizers are inviting local residents to share their stories about Blue Hill and the surrounding areas by participating in an oral history interview with Galen Koch, an audio producer, educator, and sound artist who co-founded Maine Sound + Story. Residents can sign up for 15 to 20-minute interviews with Koch.
The interviews will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Blue Hill Congregational Church and will be archived at mainesoundandstory.com. More details about the oral history project will soon be posted at Word.
