Buffy Aakaash finds inspiration from Nature, and the amazing people and beings he’s met in queer communes and big cities across the US, and now in Vermont with his pug companion, Bodhi. His chapbook, Untangling the Knots was published in 2022. His latest, a full length, Breaking, in 2025. He has poems in numerous journals and online publications both in the US and abroad.

Bethany Ann Barrett (she/her) is the recipient of a 2026 “Vermont Week” Fellowship in Fiction from Vermont Studio Center. Her ten-minute play “Our Girl” was part of NYC’s 2025 EstroGenius Festival, and her nonfiction story “Blue Christmas” was performed at Vermont Stage’s Winter Tales 2025. Bethany’s poetry, plays, and prose have recently appeared in The Soliloquist Magazine, Progenitor Art & Literary Journal, The Mountain Troubadour, The PoemCity 2025 Anthology, The Henniker Review, and The Rio Grande Review, and she is looking forward to her upcoming commission for “The Bake Off” at Vermont Stage. With a background as an Equity actor and arts administrator, Bethany just began her “third act” by studying fiction and playwriting in New England College’s Low Residency MFA Program. Awards include a 2024 UT-El Paso Creative Writing (Fiction) Award, the South Florida Theater Critics Association’s Carbonell Award, and Miami’s New Theatre Award. Originally from a tiny Erie Canal town in upstate New York, Bethany spent four decades in the Sunbelt and now lives in the hills of rural Vermont with her husband and their ragtag pack of four rescue dogs.

Sunday Afternoon Poetry at the Jaquith monthly poetry readings are free and open to the public and held at the Jaquith Public Library, 122 School Street, Marshfield, Vermont.

sponsored in part by Jasper Hill Farm