Best Photos from 2021

4000 copies of “We Contain Multitudes” by Sarah Henstra arrived at the Vermont Humanities office in May. A small masked crew helped bring the boxes of our Vermont Reads 2021 book up our side ramp into the building. For many of us, it was the first time we had seen our colleagues in person for many months.

In 2021 we recorded most of our Words in the Woods events for online distribution due to the pandemic. We visited Sweet Pond State Park in Guilford, VT with poet Shanta Lee in June, who read from her collection, “GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues.” Shanta’s book later won the Vermont Book Award for poetry.

The goal of our summer Humanities Camps is to offer new learning opportunities for young people who may not be thriving in traditional academic settings. An outdoor Humanities Camp in East Corinth focused on indigenous knowledge. Students learned to make traditional crafts such as the “burn bowl” pictured here. Photo by Miranda Miller,

At the East Corinth Humanities Camp, Abenaki elder and ethnobotanist Lynn Murphy led an exploration with the students. Photo by Miranda Miller.

In August we visited the Taconic Mountains Ramble with poet Sarah Audsley. In our recording, Sarah read six selections from her forthcoming poetry collection, and reflected with Vermont Humanities staffers Rachel Edens and Sahra Ali on the power of place and the influence of identity.

The Taconic Mountains Ramble in Hubbardton is Vermont’s newest state park. Words in the Woods is a collaboration between Vermont Humanities, Vermont State Parks, and the Vermont Arts Council. We loved walking around the gorgeous grounds of the Ramble with poet Sarah Audsley in August.

We visited Woodstock Union High School in September to join an outdoor assembly and give the Victor R. Swenson Humanities Educator Award to Susan Piccoli, library media specialist at WUHS. We present the award each year to an outstanding humanities educator in Vermont; Victor Swenson founded Vermont Humanities in 1974.

Susan Piccoli has led students in several Vermont Reads programs over the years, and even brought a (literal) busload of students up to the Flynn in October 2019 to hear and meet with the late Congressman John Lewis and his “March Trilogy” co-author Andrew Aydin. “March: Book One” was our Vermont Reads choice that year.

Our Fall Conference 2021 on the humanities and climate change in October concluded with “Rising Tide,” a hybrid live and streaming performance by the Fry Street Quartet and physicist Dr. Robert Davies. We were thrilled to collaborate with the UVM Lane Series on this live performance, and also thrilled to see old friends again “in real life” after 18 months of virtual presentations. Photo by Andrew McCallister