2026 Teachers
Patrick Rosal
Patrick Rosal is the author of five full-length poetry collections including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, which won the William Carlos Williams Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent and forthcoming publication credits include Orion, American Poetry Review, and Poetry. His previous collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016), won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize for best book of poetry and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry. Previously, Boneshepherds (2011) was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets.
Patrick is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers-Camden, teaching courses on poetry, performance, improvisation, collaboration, and community art, and serving as Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, where he coordinates the programming series Occasions for Gathering and Quilting Water, an art project collecting interviews about water from around the world and collaborating with local quilters.
A self-taught musician and composer, he is currently building a sequence of short art songs and he recently completed a setting of the Lucille Clifton poem “sorrows” for voice and piano. He is well-versed in hip hop production techniques as well as analog and digital synthesis. He is a student of Afro-Cuban percussion, sacred music, improvised/creative modes, and many folkloric traditions from the Philippines, the Pacific, South America and the Caribbean.
Adrian Blevins
Adrian Blevins’s most recent book of poetry is Status Pending, winner of the 2024 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Her other full-length collections are Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. She also co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. Blevins is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Lily Henley
Lily Henley is a singer, fiddler, songwriter, and scholar whose work is steeped in ancestral memory as well as living traditions. Her album Oras Dezaoradas (Lior Éditions Records) centers the Ladino language, a critically endangered tongue that is a blend of old Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish, and the Sephardic women who carried it across centuries of exile and diaspora. Rather than reinterpretation, Henley’s music is a reclamation. Her newly written songs and melodies stitch a living thread between her American and Celtic folk roots and the deep cultural inheritance of her Sephardi ancestors. These songs hold everyday joys and sorrows: love, loss, longing, and counsel. They offer listeners a doorway into their own inherited stories.
In performance, Henley weaves ancient and contemporary languages, cultures, and styles into an intimate, spellbinding experience marked by expressive fiddling and bell-clear vocals. A Fulbright recipient and former Artist-in-Residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, the New York Sephardic Music Festival, and beyond, and is currently touring with Rising Appalachia. Whether on stage or in circle, Henley’s work reveals the enduring power of women’s voices and song as vessels of memory, continuity, and connection.
Duncan Wickel
Duncan Wickel is a dynamic and versatile string instrumentalist, known for his mastery of the fiddle, cello, and viola—each of which he has artfully adapted across a wide range of musical genres. Raised in a musically rich household, Duncan gained early insight into the mechanics of instruments through his father, a skilled repair technician at a local music store. Inspired by his aunt to pick up the violin, he performed with the Asheville Symphony by age 14 and soon launched a career as an in-demand session musician. A passionate admirer of Irish music, Duncan realized a dream when the legendary John Doyle invited him on tour. Since then, he has toured and recorded with renowned artists including The Wood Brothers, Molly Tuttle, The Duhks, and Ruth Moody. In 2025, while touring with Lily Henley, he delivered a powerful performance of Sephardic Jewish ballads at NAMM’s Museum of Making Music. Duncan is equally devoted to education, having taught workshops in more than 20 countries around the world.
Matthew Glassman
Matthew Glassman is a father/ writer/ actor/ creator of original, ensemble theatre. Performing, creating, and collaborating is his passion and calling. Currently the Executive & Artistic Director of the Chocolate Church Arts Center in Bath, Maine, Matthew is the former Co-Artistic Director and Ensemble Member for over 20 years of Double Edge Theatre. For over two decades, he co-created and performed in dozens of site-specific spectacles and indoor performances that toured around the world. Matthew loves making connections between the realms of imagination with the becoming of community, the unfolding of dreams, the awe of the natural world, and building grass-roots movements toward systemic change. He believes art is intrinsic to the health and happiness of a community. Making art in rural and working communities is where it’s at for Matthew. Since 2022, he’s been working with children as part of his artistic work, with a project called the Unnameable Children’s Project that fashions itself as a black mountain college for kids.
Aylie Baker
Aylie grew up in Yarmouth, Maine and spent much of her childhood sailing downeast with her family along the coast of Wabanakik–the Dawn Land–ancestral home of the Wabanaki peoples. Her life is deeply influenced by time she spent living in Micronesia in her twenties, sailing traditional canoes and supporting the continuance of canoe culture there. She now lives near Lake Champlain, where she is a student at the Vermont Zen Center. She works as a preschool teacher, a gardener and a clinical herbalist. You can find her writings in publications such as Emergence Magazine, and find her quietly storytelling on The Moth.
Abraham & Halima Sussman
Halima and Abraham are Senior Mentor Teachers of the Dances of Universal Peace. These sacred movement and music practices bring joy and heart connection to circles and communities. They are a form of active meditation, with live music, drawn from the diverse cultural roots of Universal Sufism. They travel and teach internationally, and are inspired musicians and experienced guides on the path of the awakening heart. Their teaching taps into the depths that arise from integrating spiritual practice, psychological exploration and a love of the natural world.
Timothy Frantzich
Timothy Frantzich has been working in music and with community for the last 35 years. For the last five years, Timothy has led a community song circle every week in Minneapolis. He calls it “Perfection-Free Community Singing,” and you can follow that group on Facebook. Timothy has come to believe that singing together and creating harmony on the fly is the medicine for this time. You will have the option of singing every morning at the Great Mother Conference for an hour before daybreak.
Bruce Hamm
Sarod artist Bruce Hamm is a long time disciple of the revered Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. Bruce began his studies with Khansahib at the Ali Akbar College in 1974. He has pursued a serious and continuous study of instrumental and vocal music since then.
In 1981 he performed the traditional thread tying ceremony to symbolize his bond to his Guru. Bruce is one of a handful of disciples chosen by Khansahib to be main instructors at the Ali Akbar College after his passing.
Bruce has had the opportunity on multiple occasions to accompany his Guru Ali Akbar Khan onstage. He has also had the privilege of performing with many of India’s leading artists, including Swapan Chaudhuri, Zakir Hussain and Anindo Chatterjee. Bruce continues his mentor’s legacy today as a respected teacher and performer, mesmerizing crowds worldwide and keeping alive the tradition of the Maihar Gharana.
Joanna Mack
From 1997 to 2005, Joanna Mack traveled to Kolkata, India where she fully devoted herself to the pursuit of North Indian Classical Music and the sitar under the guidance of the Pandit Deepak Choudhury, a senior disciple of the renowned Pandit Ravi Shankar. Returning to the United States, she had the honour to attend classes at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. She now continues her life-long journey with regular classes with Sitarist Pandit Partha Chatterjee and Sarodia Bruce Hamm. She teaches private and group classes and performs in a variety of venues worldwide.
Yofe Johnson
Yofe has been teaching yoga and movement for over 40 years. Her work combines a love for Tai Chi, Yoga, and Qigong to expand awareness of our breath, our movements, and our consciousness.
Jay Leeming
Jay Leeming is a performance storyteller adept at bringing ancient myths and stories alive through the power of the spoken word. A regular performer in theaters, schools, festivals and National Parks, he is the creator of the Crane Bag podcast, the author of three books of poetry and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. More information about his work as well as recordings of his performances of the Epic of Gilgamesh, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” numerous Norse myths and the Odyssey can be found at www.JayLeeming.com.
Cary Odes
Since ancient times, the trickster has been a powerful and vibrant part of any community.
With quick wit and brave insight, they skewer the pompous and bring balance to somber proceedings. But instead, the conference is bringing back Cary Odes. Cary has been lifting the spirits of the conference on and off since 1979, and provides the best mythopoetic comedy you'll ever hear in a camp in Maine. In his book Iron John, Robert Bly called Cary “the Trickster in a wonderfully pure form.” Because of Bly’s influence in the comedy world, Cary’s career was transformed overnight, and was forever after exactly the same.
Cary may also teach workshops in Nature Awareness, (which, oddly he can actually do) including how to leave a building and not walk immediately into another building, sometimes for days in a row. He makes the fastest bow drill fire of any professional comedian.
Miguel Rivera
Miguel Rivera was born in Guatemala and moved to the United States in 1966 at the age of 13.
A dedicated translator and cultural bridge-builder, he collaborated with Robert Bly in 2001 to translate and publish Poems I Brought Down from the Mountain, an English collection of poetry by Humberto Ak'abal. His translation work also includes bilingual editions such as Tejiendo las Huellas (Uruguay, 2006), El Animalero (Guatemala, 2008), and In the Courtyard of the Moon (U.S., 2021).
Since 1993, Miguel has been a core teacher at the Minnesota Men’s Conference and, since 2010, at The Great Mother Conference. He has also served as a board member of Shade Tree, a mentoring group in Los Angeles, since its inception in 1996. As the Director and Co-founder of the Western Gate Roots Foundation, he works to restore rites of passage for youth.
Miguel is a Guild of Future Architects member and serves on the advisory boards of Wolf Connection and Mil-Tree. He was previously on the Board of Directors for Soldier’s Heart, an organization dedicated to supporting veterans.
In addition to his mentorship and cultural work, Miguel is the Co-producer and Sound Designer for the School of Lived Experience podcasts. He has been an award-winning Supervising Sound Editor for film and television since 1984.
Marcus Wise
Marcus Wise tabla artist. Disciple of Ustad Diam Ali Qadri . 50 years performing for GMC accompanying myriad of poets and musicians. Has concertized extensively across the world and has recorded on myriad of albums/cds and movies. Marcus has many students and continues teaching private lessons from his home.
Matthew Yeager
Matthew Yeager's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, as well as numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2005, 2010, and 2024, The Strategic Poet, The Inquisitive Eater, and 20 Years of Poem-of-the-Week.com. “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment,” his micro-budget short film, was an official selection at eleven film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. His “Poem to First Love” has been featured in Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, and Brides, and has been translated into several languages, including Urdu and Chinese. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in short prose and multiple fellowships to both MacDowell and Yaddo. The co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series from 2011 - 2021, Yeager’s first book, Like That, received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. He is married to the poet Chelsea Whitton and currently teaches at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
2026 Art Gallery Director
Clara DeGalan is a visual artist based in Ann Arbor, MI. Her work has been featured locally and nationally in group, three-person, and solo exhibitions. Her art criticism has been published in Detroit Art Review, Essay'd, and InfiniteMile among others. She has curated exhibitions at The Scarab Club Detroit, The University of Toledo, Wayne State University, and The Great Mother and New Father Conference.
Clara DeGalan
2026 Youth Program Directors
Emilia Dahlin is an award-winning singer/songwriter and teaching artist who believes that stories and songs are some of the most powerful tools to connect us and foster positive change.
Emilia traversed the U.S. while touring for a decade, was part of the founding team of Rippleffect (an outdoor experiential non-profit, that still serves thousands of children each year off their island base in Casco Bay), and spent a year-long pilgrimage visiting intentional communities across the globe. She’s deeply committed to exploring and supporting combinations of community and the arts and how they heal and nurtures us.
Emilia's the founder and facilitator of Sing Me A Story, a professional development workshop for early childhood educators and librarians who wish to enliven, strengthen, and widen their learning spaces through song. Emilia’s also a mother, gardener, activist, and outdoor enthusiast who loves to dance!
Emilia Dahlin
Owen Murphy
Owen Murphy is a US Coast Guard credentialed boat captain, Registered Maine Guide, and the owner/operator of Maine Coastal Adventures– a lobster tour company based out of Phippsburg ME. With a Wilderness First Responder medical certification and experience as a former trip leader with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, Owen is passionate about connecting people to nature. He holds two Maine state teaching certifications and has over ten years of experience teaching Spanish and English as a Second Language in US public schools. Owen has also taught environmental and outdoor education both in the US and abroad. He currently resides in coastal Maine and Mexico with his wife, Courtney, and their two children, Oisín and Caoimhe. Owen is excited to lead the kids' program alongside Emilia after years of hearing how magical the program is from Courtney (who will be leading a trek in Peru during this time).