The culmination of poet Abigail Michelini’s summer Artist-in-Residency at Northampton Community College is a new Poetry Walk at the college’s East 40 Center for Place-Based Learning, located on NCC's Bethlehem campus. Michelini, who is an Assistant Professor of English at NCC, spent several weeks over the summer months walking, sitting, listening, and writing about her interactions, thoughts, and experiences in the East 40.
Inspired by the woods, meadows, and community gardens of these acres, she ultimately crafted nine poems which comprise the walk. She recorded each of the poems, and created a website that features both the audio and text versions of the poems (abigailmichelini.com/east-40-poetry-walk).
The Poetry Walk includes a marker at the nine different locations where individual poems were written; a QR code on each sign directs the participant to the website to hear and/or read the poem. Michelini is an alumna of NCC and went on to complete her BA in English - Creative Writing at Lehigh University. She holds a masters in Post Secondary Education and a PhD in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Other work can be found in Topic Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Voice of Eve, America’s Emerging Poets of 2018, and One Person’s Trash, among other publications. She is Poetry Editor of Oyster River Pages, a non-profit literary arts journal which seeks to promote historically underrepresented voices in publishing.