The Guilford Poets Guild is a group award-winning, published poets from Guilford and the shoreline who meet regularly to share poems and promote the love and engagement of poetry within the community. Throughout the year the GPG hosts a number of poetry readings including its popular Second Thursday Poetry Series, a Holiday Roundtable, the Guilford High School Poetry Contest, and coordinates poetry/art events with Guilford Art Center, the Madison Art Society and the Florence Griswold Museum.
Originally referred to as The Shoreline Poets, many GPG members have been meeting to discuss poetry since the 1970s. The Guilford Poets Guild was officially organized in 1998 to produce An Anthology of Guilford Poets, and a number of its original members have continued to meet on a bi-weekly basis ever since.
In 2019, the Guild celebrated its 20th anniversary with the publication of its third anthology of poems, Our Changing Environment.
Membership is by invitation. Current members, most of whom are pictured above, are Carol Leavitt Altieri, Evelyn Atreya, Gwen Gunn, Juliana Harris, Julie Fitzpatrick, Margaret Iacobellis, Karen Gronback Johnson, Norman Thomas Marshall, Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely, Jane Muir, Old Saybrook Poet Laureate Patricia Horn O’Brien, Sharon Olson, Jennifer A. Payne, Elizabeth Possidente, Jane Ulrich, Edward Walker, and Guilford’s Poet Laureate Gordy Whiteman.
For more information, please call 203-453-5213.
Guilford Poets Guild 
I know I’ve said this in various ways already, but this is SO great, Sharon!!
Hi Sharon,
You keep a nice web-site. I will visit it often, now that I know my way around.
Maybe I could take a photo of Gwen and Margaret, and you could put the photo below ours, to include all of us for this year. Next time I am with both of them, I will do that.
Great Job!
The Guild thanks you, I am sure. Audrey
I thank all of you for your inspiring messages, your compassion, your many kindnesses and your persevering with marvelous poems.
Wishing you a safe, healthy, peaceful new year with no ill health or tragedies.
I am truly blessed to be with such talented and good writers.
Hi, Guilford Poets Guild,
I’m hoping to attend the Vivian Shipley reading this Thursday. I’m interested in discovering how to be considered for a featured reader slot for your events. I have written a chapbook of poetry, “Licking the Spoon,” which was published in 2007 by Finishing Line Press, and my first full-length collection, titled “Strange Girls,” about women in sideshows, circuses, and carnivals, was just released this June by Little Red Tree Publishing. I’ve read at many venues throughout CT and New England, including the Hygienic Arts Gallery, the Mystic Arts Cafe, and Stone Soup in Cambridge, to name a few.
Please contact me at your convenience. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Joanie DiMartino
Hello Shoreline Cluster Poets,
I’m not sure I understand this comment. But we are grateful you have posted our reading on your website. You might want to have the link go NOT to our “About” page but just to https://guilfordpoetsguild.wordpress.com where we have the latest information about all our readings. Does that help?
Sharon Olson
Could you send me the e-address of the Guild’s point person who arranges events for members of the Guild? The Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington (site of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival) is interested in establishing a working relationship with the Guild. Thanks.
Hello Guild Poets, Just wanted to say hello, and to tell you that I met one of your members last week when I gave a poetry writing workshop at the Fresh Ink Writers Conference at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury. I’m so sorry that I don’t recall her name, but I was impressed with her energy and enthusiastic participation in the workshop and so decided to look you up. Your reading series sounds excellent and your poetry activities are enticing—congratulations! If you’re ever looking for a reader or a workshop leader, I’d love to be considered. If all your members are as great to work with as this one member was, it would indeed be a pleasure! Information about my publications can be found on my website, http://www.cortneydavis.com. (I’m also the poetry editor of Alimentum: the Literature of Food, so if any of your members have “food” poems, send them along.) Thank you and write well! Cortney
Where is Gwen Gunn now?? I knew her from a long time ago. She was the videographer for a script I wrote for the now-defunct Museum of American Theatre.
I would like to present a poetry performance and book signing at the Guilford Poets Guild. You will find samples of my work on my website. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Charles Fort
http://www.charlesfortpoet.com
brownzorro@gmail.com
cell: 740-501-0861
Fort’s books include We Did Not Fear the Father (New and Selected Poems) Red Hen Press 2012, Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz (New and Selected Prose Poems) Backwaters Press, 2013, The Town Clock Burning, Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Frankenstein Was A Negro, Loganhouse Press. Fort’s poems have appeared in journals, periodicals, and anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best American Poetry 2000, Best of Prose Poem International, The Georgia Review, and The American Poetry Review. . Born in working class New Britain, Connecticut, he is the founder of the Wendy Fort Foundation Theater of Fine Arts. A MacDowell fellow, Fort is currently at work on Sorrow Road, One Hundred Villanelles, and a novel: The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut.