Manchester Community Library is proud to partner with The Ruth Stone House (RSH) to offer a free writing workshop for Poetry Month. RSH Cofounders Bianca Stone and Ben Pease will host a two-hour generative workshop where new work will be written and discussed.

Bianca Stone is a writer, visual artist and teacher born and raised in Vermont. She received her MFA from New York University in 2009, where she worked and lived for many years. Stone is the author the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House, 2014), Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours (Pleiades, 2016), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018) and most recently What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). Her hybrid works include the children’s book A Little Called Pauline (Penny Candy Books, 2021), with text by Gertrude Stein; and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated Antigonick, a book of Carson’s translation of Antigone (New Directions, 2012).

Ben Pease is a poet and multi-disciplinary writer who is dedicated to fostering a more accessible literary community in Vermont and beyond. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection Chateau Wichman: A Blockbuster in Verse, a Dungeons & Dragons adventure module set on the Ruth Stone property called The Light of Mount Horrid, the hybrid illustrated edition Furniture in Space, and several chapbooks. He holds undergraduate degrees in Political Communication and Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. He is the Executive Director of the Ruth Stone House, Communication Coordinator at Otter Creek Engineering, and book designer for factory hollow press. He lives in Brandon, VT with his wife, Bianca Stone, and their daughter, Odette.