Poets Marion Brown, Spring Ulmer, Charles Weld and Kathryn Weld all have long-time connections to the Adirondack region, from Lake Clear to Lake Champlain.  The three women hold current or former academic positions, (English and Mathematics) while Charles worked for a non-profit agency that provides mental health services to youth and families. Kathy and Marion also share poetic community through the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Westchester County, where they have workshopped and attended readings together. Kathy and Charles are first cousins; Kathy, in fact, credits Charles’s first published chapbook, Country I Would Settle In, as a catalyst to incorporate writing into her life.

Marion Brown, from Yonkers, NY, has published two poetry chapbooks, Tasted and The Morning After Summer, with Finishing Line Press. Guesthouse, Liber, Kestrel, Gyroscope Review, and DIAGRAM are among publications where her poems have appeared. For 27 years, she and her husband, Alan Brown, were part-time residents of Westport. She serves on the Advisory Committee of Slapering Hol Press and the National Council of Graywolf Press. Her website is marionbrownpoet.com. Reading in Whallonsburg feels like coming home.

 Charlie Weld’s poems have been collected in two chapbooks, Country I Would Settle In (Pudding House, 2004) and Who Cooks For You? (Kattywompus, 2012.) A full-length collection, Seringo, was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. A mental health counselor educated at Cornell and the University of Maine, he’s worked as an administrator for a non-profit agency providing treatment to youth with mental health challenges in the Finger Lakes region. A 46er, his ties to the Adirondacks go back more than 100 years through his paternal grandparents who had a seasonal business on Lake Clear. Since the 1970s, he’s hiked from and relaxed at an off-grid camp in Lewis built by his parents where he and his wife now enjoy introducing grandchildren to the woods, barred owls, blackflies, and outhouse protocol.

Kathryn Weld is the author of AFTERIMAGE (Pine Row Press 2023) and a chapbook, WAKING LIGHT (Kattywompus Press 2019). Her poetry and prose appear in a wide variety of journals. Recently retired from a career as professor of mathematics at Manhattan College, she spends much of the year at an Adirondack camp on Upper St. Regis Lake purchased by her parents 60 years ago. She is an Adirondack 46er, gardener, jack-of-all-trades and herder of family cats.  Her website  is www.kathrynweld.com.

Spring Ulmer is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for Kore Press’s 2007 First Book Award);The Age of Virtual Reproduction; Bestiality of the Involved, and Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of Tupelo Press’s 2022 Dorset Prize). Her translations of Yannis Ritsos’s Exercises is forthcoming from Ugly Ducking Presse. She lives in upstate New York with her son.