Poetry Meets Music

Write On is happy to continue our collaboration with Midsummer’s Music, Poetry Meets Music. At one concert in each of Midsummer’s series offerings, a poet will read a poem written in response to a piece of music to be performed. Poets were given recordings in advance with no identifying information as to the title, composer, era, etc., and were asked not to look up this information. The result is a poem composed entirely in response to the emotions or memories the music evokes. 

For today’s concert, we are pleased to present poet Renee Mies, winner of our 2026 Dick Scuglik Memorial Fellowship. To order tickets, please visit Midsummer’s Music.

Renee Dionne Mies is a poet and memoirist whose work explores place, lineage, and the act of looking as a form of inheritance, often through ekphrastic practice. Her writing has appeared in and is forthcoming from Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Atlantic Review, Fjords Review, Beyond Words Magazine, Prosetrics Literary Magazine, and other journals. Her poems “Growing Up in Traverse City” and “The Bone Orchard at the Edge of the Sky” were finalists in the 2025 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Rooted in Northern Michigan and based in the Chicago area, she is currently completing a book-length manuscript that weaves poetry, memory, and material history.