Award-winning poet to make presentation in Stony Lake.

Michigan poet Cindy Hunter Morgan will read from her book “Harborless” at Stony Lake Saturday, Aug. 10.

Award-winning poet to make presentation in Stony Lake.

After a few years on hiatus, the Stony Lake Summer Series is back, bringing speakers to Camp Miniwanca’s Four Seasons Lodge for two programs this month, free and open to the public.

This Saturday, Aug. 10, poet Cindy Hunter Morgan will read from her book “Harborless,” which was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2018 and won the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. A chronicle of 40 shipping catastrophes in the Great Lakes, the poems describe small details and minor characters that bring the stories to life. Her program will focus not only on the poems, but also the ships that went down, as Cindy shares photographs of the vessels and stories about their fate.

Celebrated Michigan poet Thomas Lynch wrote, “Art and history, geography and prosody, folklore, flotsam, salvage and ruin: ‘Harborless’ is freighted with scholarship, imaginative heft, and virtuosity. For the star gazer, horizon scanner, boatman and long-hauler, storm watcher and lighthouse keeper, Cindy Hunter Morgan has wrought a Great Lakes classic: an epic paid out in local, heroic, and poignant doses.”

A former assistant professor at Michigan State University’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Cindy now works for the Michigan State University Library. She has published several well-received volumes and her work has been included in a variety of journals, including “Tin House Online,” “The Journal of American Poetry,” “Salamander,” “Sugar House Review,” and “West Branch.”

Her chapbook, “Apple Season,” which won the Midwest Writing Center’s 2012 Chapbook Contest, has a deep connection to Oceana County. Cindy’s family has roots in the county and many of the poems were inspired by her grandparents and their orchards in Benona Township. Throughout her childhood, she and her family camped on a lovely piece of property they still maintain on the upper reaches of Stony Creek.

On Saturday, Aug. 17, veteran ABC News foreign and domestic correspondent Bill Blakemore, whose family roots at Stony Lake go back to the 1930s, will present a program and discussion titled “Global Warming and Conceivable Hope: A View First Generated on Lower Stony Creek.”

Programs in the Stony Lake Summer Series begin at 7 p.m. in the Four Seasons Lodge at Camp Miniwanca on Stony Lake, 10 miles west of New Era. Admission is free and the public is welcome. For more information, contact stonylakewatershed@gmail.com.