Available for Readings & Workshops
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS & READINGS 2026
APRIL POETRY MONTH
Free Writing Workshop Series
Sponsored by Sarah Hull Hallock Library, Milton, NY
I. Poetry Workshop: Generating Ideas, April 11, 2-3:30pm
Practice getting poems on the page and developing these ideas. With personalized, constructive feedback, you will leave this session with the ability to generate new writing and beat writers block. Whether it’s your first time writing or you’re a seasoned pro, this course will help you to find the words you’ve been looking for. You will be sure to leave the workshop with the start of some new poems!
II. Poetry Workshop: Respond and Revise, April 18, 2-3:30pm
Join us for the second session in our Poetry Month series! In this session, participants will edit their work, receive constructive feedback, and study examples of famous poetry in order to better develop their individual style. Whether it’s your first time writing or you’re a seasoned pro, this session will help you to take your work to the next level. Bring in a poem that you would like to share for feedback.
III. Poetry Open Mic, April 24, 6-8pm
Are you a local poet? Did you sample a class in our Poetry Month series? Drop in for our Poetry Open Mic, celebrating the close of National Poetry Month, hosted by Linda McCauley Freeman. Read your own work, or pay tribute the work that inspires you.
IV. Poetry Workshop: How To Publish, April 18, 2-3:30pm
In this session, participants will learn the “next steps” for their work. With advice from both McCauley Freeman and Sarah Hull Hallock’s Will Swift, former fiction selector for Black Fox Magazine, come find out what editors are looking for, and where to send your finished pieces. Whether it’s your first time writing or you’re a seasoned pro, this course will help you to get your work into the world.
UPCOMING READINGS 2026
What She Said: Readings by Women Writers
Wednesday, March 25th at 7:00PM, Elting Library, New Paltz
Join me and other members of the Wallkill Valley Writers as we celebrate the voices of local women writers.
Living Our Blessings Poetry Reading
Sunday, April 12 at 2pm, Elting Library, New Paltz, NY
Poets Linda McCauley Freeman, Don Reilly, and Richard Parisio will read poetry and prose they have contributed to the recently published anthology Living Our Blessings
(Wising Up Press).
Living Our Blessings features poems and prose on the themes of aging, mortality and gratitude in a variety of ways: wistful, elegiac, affirmative, or even celebratory. All of the writing engages bravely and honestly, sometimes humorously, with the essential issues we all face as human beings on this planet. There will be a break during which participants will have the opportunity to write their own thoughts about “living our blessings,” and share them in a Q&A session after the reading.
BOOKS
The Marriage Manual
(Backroom Window Press, 2024)
“Read the Marriage Manual and enter love in all its incarnations.”
–Darcy Smith, River Skin
The Family Plot
(Backroom Window Press, 2022)
“Honest and brave these poems chonicale a family’s wounds and a child’s survival.”
–Beth Copeland, Blue Honey
READ MY WORK!
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Featured USA Poet in THE POET MAGAZINE
THREE POEMS FOR A NEW WORLD in New World Writing Quarterly
IMAGINE SEEING in Headlight Review
THE THINGS I WOULD SAVE in Wordpeace
THE QUEEN TALKS TO HER MIRROR in Sunlight Press
IN PRINT:
“Blondie” and “Dagwood” and Dick Tracy” and Nancy Drew” and “Peanuts” all published in MOSS PIGLET
“STILL LIFE” in Tomorrow & Tomorrow Birth Issue, 2022
“Witness” in Popshot Quarterly
IN THE NEWS
My poem “Simmering” received honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest 2024!
Check out an excerpt from my book featured on BLOOM
Reader Review:
“Linda McCauley Freeman has given us a poetic journey filled with intimate moments, sharp observations, and unforgettable imagery. Warm, wise, sometimes funny, often poignant, her narrative poems deftly marry craft and accessibility, as she chronicles both the bright and dark places of family life from youth to adulthood, never losing the thread of tenderness and compassion. A wonderful, satisfying read, and a truly impressive debut.”
THE FAMILY PLOT: Poems
Backroom Window Press, 2022
In this, her first full-length collection of poems, Linda McCauley Freeman tells the story of an American girlhood spent in a large and boisterous family that is sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes dangerous. The Family Plot is part memoir, part survival history, with plenty of space for a heroic portrait of the materfamilias, described in the title of one poem as “My Italian Catholic Human Rights Commissioner Mother” who even as she descends into dementia rises mightily from her chair. Rises mightily, one might add, in these poems as one focus of meaning amidst this rich complexity of personality over which the poet’s keen intelligence broods with an objectivity not devoid of kindness and deep affection. “I will remind her who she is/every time she forgets,” McCauley Freeman writes, and again, “It’s not that I can’t remember/her face, a kaleidoscope/of pictures. . . .”
Read the Reviews
Buy the Book
BIO
Linda McCauley Freeman is the author of the full-length poetry collections The Marriage Manual (BWP, 2024) and The Family Plot (Backroom Window Press, 2022) and has been widely published in international journals, including in a Chinese translation. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022. Recently she was the featured poet in The Poet Magazine, and appeared in Delta Poetry Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and won Grand Prize in StoriArts’Maya Angelou poetry contest, and honorable mention in the 2024 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Lines from one of her poems were selected by Kwame Alexander to use in his Civil Community Poem and are on display at the Civil Rights Memorial Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. She received a grant from Arts MidHudson and was selected for Poets Respond to Art 2020, 2021 2022 and 2024 shows. She was a three-time winner in the Talespinners Short Story contest judged by Michael Korda. She has an MFA from Bennington College and is the former poet-in-residence of the Putnam Arts Council. She lives in the Hudson Valley, NY, where she is also a swing dance teacher (www.got2lindy.com) and yoga instructor (www.blissbodyoga.com)
