Watch the 2022 Opening Ceremony:
Keynote Speaker:
Chloe Maxmin
Opening keynote, Chloe Maxmin, is the co-director of Dirt Road Organizing, a nonprofit organization that empowers rural people to build power for a resilient, equitable, and democratic future by providing training, supporting grassroots leadership, and offering resources for community change. She also works for JustME doing targeted youth civic engagement work.
Chloe grew up on a venison farm in Nobleboro, ME. Her work with civic engagement started at a young age, when she founded the Lincoln Academy Climate Action Club as a ninth grader. Later, she received an honors degree from Harvard College, where she co-founded Divest Harvard, a climate activist coalition of students, alumni, and faculty. She currently lives and works on a farm participating in the program, “Mainers Feeding Mainers”.
She is passionate about uniting rural communities on values and common ground, a drive which allowed her to serve in the Maine House of Representatives after becoming the first democrat to win Maine House District 88. Two years later, Maxmin became the youngest woman ever to serve in the Maine State Senate. At 28 years old, she unseated a two-term incumbent and Senate Minority Leader, making her the first candidate to unseat a party leader in Maine since 1992.
With her campaign manager and best friend, Canyon Woodward, she co-authored a book about their personal approach to campaigning, Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on it. Maxmin and Woodward are also featured in a short documentary about finding purpose and common ground in rural America called Rural Runners. The film premiered earlier this year at Mountainfilm in Telluride and will be screened again in September at the Monadnock International Film Festival.
Music:
Windborne Singers
Windborne’s captivating show draws on the singers’ deep roots in traditions of vocal harmony, while the absolute uniqueness of their artistic approach brings old songs into the present. Known for the innovation of their arrangements, their harmonies are bold and anything but predictable. With a 20-year background studying polyphonic music around the world, Lauren Breunig, Jeremy Carter-Gordon, Lynn Rowan, and Will Rowan share a vibrant energy onstage with a blending of voices that can only come from decades of friendship alongside dedicated practice. The ensemble shifts effortlessly between drastically different styles of music, drawing their audience along on a journey that spans continents and centuries, illuminating and expanding on the profound power and variation of the human voice. The singers educate as they entertain, sharing stories about their songs and explaining the context and characteristics of the styles in which they sing.
Poetry:
Alice Fogel
Alice B Fogel served as the New Hampshire poet laureate from 2014 through 2019. Her latest poetry collection is Nothing But, a series of poems responding to Abstract Expressionist art and its effect on our consciousness. Two of her previous books are A Doubtful House and Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among other awards, she is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry even if you don’t “get” it. She works one-on-one with students with learning differences at Landmark College in Putney, VT, and is happy to live in Walpole, NH.
