BIG NIGHT 2024
Friday, June 14th
5:00pm - 6:30pm
King Middle School - Portland, ME
Photos by Rylan Hynes
Our celebration of young writers published from 2023 - 2024 included a book fair with sales and signings, author readings from our newest annual anthology, This Moment and the Next, moving musical performances by students at the Maine Academy of Modern Music, an interactive game of bingo, and award announcements. We honored all the students who have been published with The Telling Room this year while launching This Moment and the Next. Congratulations, authors!
This Moment and the Next
In This Moment and the Next, a literary anthology of stories and poems by forty-three Maine authors, you’ll find writing about an “unfortunate dragonfly,” tiny creatures in red hats, a school for clouds, metaphorical peaches, a sister’s shoes, a cow named Horse, a snowman in a snowsuit, insomnia, and an unsolvable Rubik’s cube. The pieces will take you along journeys into outer space, through unknown jungles, to the middle of the ocean; through illness, loss and grief, back to New York City in 1985, and even into the future.
The writing in this book is a call to memory, joy, connection, and action, offering us explorations of family, growing up, transformation, identity, racism, learning, and the always-unfinished understanding of what it takes to be seen. This Moment and the Next asks us to remember that when we give ourselves time to see, listen, understand, and think, the present is potent with possibilities.
ANTHOLOGY | $22.00 | Paperback | 2024 | ISBN 979-8-9877055-6-8
THANK YOU
Our 2023-24 youth writing and publishing programs—and Big Night—are made possible through the generous support of many individual donors, corporate partners and sponsors, and grants from: the Anonimo Foundation; the Jane B. Cook 1992 Charitable Trust; the Lesher Family Foundation; the Maine Humanities Council; the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust; Mascoma Bank; the Moser Family Foundation; the Onion Foundation; the Peter Alfond Foundation; the Rines Thompson Fund of the Maine Community Foundation; the Smith Family Charitable Trust; the Roaring Brook Family Foundation; the Rona Jaffe Foundation; Virginia Hodgkins Somers Foundation; and WEX. We thank you all.
SPECIAL THANKS
We are so grateful to King Middle School and Portland Public Schools for accommodating us this evening, to Flatbread Company for their donation of food, SPACE for lending us tables, and to the Maine Academy of Modern Music for partnering with us on sound tonight, and for bringing their talented performeres to the stage.