Reading: Martin Steingesser

Greenhut is pleased to present a reading, Seeing with the Heart's Ear, a performance of new and selected work by beloved Maine poet and Bill Bonyun Award winning writer and educator, Martin Steingesser.

Steingesser is the author of three books of poems, Yellow Horses, Brothers of Morning, and The Thinking Heart: the Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum. The poet also authored an earlier version of a current performance work, "Etty's Song," and a collaboration by Off the Page: A Musician and 2 Poets, of which Martin is a founding member. The Thinking Heart, based on Hillesum's journal and letters, toured New England and Europe and was performed at the International Etty Hillesum Congress in Belgium and in Oswiecim, Poland, home of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum. Locally, Steingesser, Portland's inaugural Poet Laureate, has performed solo for diverse audiences from the Poetry and Jazz Festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the State House at the Maine Capitol. A teaching artist in Maine Artist-in-Residence programs for 35 years, Steingesser is currently on the Maine Arts Commission's Elder Arts Program Teaching Artist Roster and was given the Maine Alliance for Arts Education's 2006 Bill Bonyun Award "for exemplified talent and professionalism as an artist and contributions to arts education."

"Writing and presenting poems is a way I touch and make present a sense of grace I want in my life. There are moments performing poems when windows, doors, walls blow off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with whoever is listening." ~ Martin Steingesser