Stonington Literary Festival Turns James Merrill’s Centennial Into a Borough-Wide Celebration

This isn’t a literary festival confined to a theater or conference center.

The Borough itself becomes part of it.

Programs spread through La Grua Center, Borough Hall, the Stonington Borough Fire House, NESS and other locations. Visitors can walk the streets that found their way into James Merrill’s poetry, tour the apartment where he did much of his writing, visit the cemetery where he is buried, hear musicians turn his poems into songs and listen to writers who knew him or have been shaped by his work.

Organizers expect more than 300 people for roughly 30 events across seven venues.

The occasion is a significant one: 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Merrill’s birth.

And Stonington isn’t simply hosting his centennial.

It was his home.

A Poet Who Made Stonington Part of His Work

James Ingram Merrill was born in New York in 1926, the son of Charles Merrill, co-founder of Merrill Lynch.

His life eventually took him around the world, particularly to Greece and later Key West, but Stonington became one of his creative anchors.

Merrill and his longtime partner, David Jackson, made their home at 107 Water Street, and Merrill owned the building from 1956 until his death in 1995.

It became much more than an address.

Merrill produced virtually all of his major writing during the years he owned the Water Street home. Stonington’s people, relationships, houses, streets and rhythms increasingly entered his work, and the apartment became a gathering place for writers, artists and intellectuals.

One of his poetry collections was simply called Water Street.

Merrill eventually accumulated an extraordinary list of honors: the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bollingen Prize among them.

His Divine Comedies won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The Water Street home was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016, recognized for its association with one of the most significant American writers of the second half of the 20th century.

That relationship between writer and place is what gives this festival an unusual advantage. Attendees aren’t discussing Merrill in some distant convention hall.

They’re discussing him in the village where he lived and wrote.

Saturday Turns the Borough Into a Literary Campus

Saturday, Oct. 3, is the festival’s biggest day, with programming divided into three blocks at 9 a.m., 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Instead of funneling everyone toward the same stage, organizers have scheduled simultaneous small-group programs around the Borough.

At 9 a.m., choices include The Apartment Aesthetic, a conversation about houses and their symbolic and literal roles in literature; Merrill in Stonington, exploring his friendships, writing and life in the village; and Objects & Poems, an object-based writing workshop with Timothy Donnelly.

Participants in that workshop are encouraged to bring an object of their own, while objects from the James Merrill House collection will also be used as writing prompts.

There’s also an Emerging Voices Open Mic, hosted by Stonington Poet Laureate Christie Max Williams.

That structure continues at 11 a.m., when the subjects become even more revealing.

Ghosts, Ouija Boards and Merrill’s Other World

One of the weekend’s most intriguing sessions examines a side of Merrill’s work that can surprise people who know him only by reputation.

Merrill and Jackson spent years experimenting with a Ouija board.

Those sessions eventually became central to Merrill’s enormous supernatural poetic project, The Changing Light at Sandover, in which communication with spirits develops into an elaborate cosmology populated by voices from another world.

The festival’s Ghosts, Ouija & the Occult program explores Merrill’s engagement with mysticism, spiritualism and the occult and its relationship to Sandover.

The session has already sold out, with organizers directing interested attendees to a waitlist.

It’s an example of how deeply the festival is willing to venture into Merrill’s world. This isn’t simply a succession of people reading poems from a podium.

Queer History, Poetry of Place and the Yale Connection

At the same hour, another panel places the James Merrill House within the larger story of 20th-century LGBTQ history.

Merrill and Jackson shared the Water Street home for decades, and the house’s National Historic Landmark designation recognizes a place associated not only with a major American writer but with a significant same-sex partnership during an era when gay lives were rarely preserved so visibly in the historic record.

Elsewhere, Rachel Hadas and David Yezzi will explore Merrill’s poetry of place, including his writing about Greece.

La Grua Center hosts another branch of Merrill’s legacy: his relationship with the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Merrill served as judge of the influential poetry prize from 1983 through 1989. The James Merrill House later established a partnership with Yale University Press through which Younger Poets Prize winners receive residencies at his Stonington home.

The festival panel brings together poets selected during Merrill’s years with the series and writers who later came to Stonington through the residency.

That program is free.

The Afternoon Gets Playful

At 2 p.m., one session looks at Merrill’s influence on later writers through Poetic Afterlives, while another, Close Encounters With James Merrill, examines individual poems from different periods of his career.

Then there’s Wordplay & Crosswords.

Adrienne Raphel, Christopher Spaide and Natan Last use Merrill’s fascination with language, puns and form as the starting point for a program that crosses poetry with puzzles and includes a workshop component devoted to constructing poetic puzzles and puzzling poems.

It’s another glimpse of Merrill beyond the imposing literary résumé: a writer fascinated by games, patterns, hidden connections and the possibilities contained inside words.

You Can Actually Go Upstairs

Perhaps the most unusual ticket of the weekend isn’t for a reading at all.

Festival visitors can register for tours of the James Merrill House at 107 Water Street.

The third- and fourth-floor apartment remains remarkably close to the way Merrill left it. This is not a reconstructed writer’s room assembled decades afterward from photographs.

It is the place itself.

Visitors enter the colorful, idiosyncratic rooms in which Merrill and Jackson lived and where much of his major work took shape.

The building’s preservation extends to the atmosphere of the apartment, its furnishings and personal objects. More than 100 writers have subsequently stayed at the house through its writer-in-residence program.

The tours are free but require registration and are deliberately small, with a maximum of 20 people per session.

There’s an important limitation: the Merrill apartment is not wheelchair accessible and requires climbing steep stairs.

Walk Through Merrill’s Stonington

The centennial also moves outside.

Historic Stonington is leading Stonington Village Literary Walking Tours, beginning at the Stonington Lighthouse at 7 Water Street.

The $25 walks trace the village through its literary history, including the community Merrill called home for more than four decades.

That distinction matters. This isn’t simply a Merrill walking tour. The idea is to place him within Stonington’s broader literary landscape and the writers connected to the village.

Tours are capped at 20 participants and require at least five people to run.

There are also Poets Corner Cemetery Tours through Stonington Cemetery during the weekend.

Music Gives Six Merrill Poems Another Life

The festival begins Friday evening with one of its most ambitious events.

Composer and pianist Matthew Aucoin joins Grammy-winning tenor Nicholas Phan at La Grua Center for Merrill Songs, Aucoin’s song cycle setting six Merrill poems to music.

The selections stretch across Merrill’s work and include A Downward Look, The Kimono, Grass, Last Words, Sonnet from Sandover and An Upward Look.

Aucoin received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018 and has had operatic work presented by major companies including the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Phan is a Grammy-winning lyric tenor and co-founder of Art Song Chicago.

A reception with drinks and hors d’oeuvres follows the performance.

Tickets are $75, with a $50 rate for former Merrill Fellows and session leaders.

Henri Cole Takes the Centennial Stage

Saturday’s daytime sessions lead into the festival’s keynote program.

Poet Henri Cole, a former Merrill Fellow, delivers the keynote at 5 p.m. at La Grua Center.

The program is free and will also be livestreamed.

The evening then moves outside the Borough for the Centennial Celebration Dinner Honoring the Merrill Family at The Hounds.

The dinner recognizes the family’s role in sustaining Merrill’s legacy and the James Merrill House. Tickets are $175, with a reduced $100 price for session leaders and former fellows.

A complimentary shuttle will carry attendees between the village and The Hounds.

Sunday Brings Merrill’s World Together

Sunday morning may be the weekend’s broadest attempt to put Merrill into perspective.

James Merrill and His World, Parts 1 and 2 brings together poets, scholars and people closely connected to his work for two consecutive panels moderated by Stephen Yenser, Merrill’s literary executor, and Langdon Hammer, author of a major Merrill biography.

The participants include Hilton Als, Matthew Aucoin, Jennifer Clarvoe, Peter Dimock, Rachel Hadas, Ange Mlinko, Jonathan Post, Mary Jo Salter, Willard Spiegelman and Lee Zimmerman.

The program runs from 10 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. at La Grua Center and costs $25.

At 2 p.m., Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and writer Hilton Als reads from his introduction to Merrill’s memoir A Different Person, exploring his own encounter with Merrill’s work, gay domesticity and the losses of the AIDS era.

Then the festival ends where Stonington and Merrill’s poetry meet most directly.

At 3 p.m., former Merrill Fellows gather for a reading of Water Street, led by Rob Schlegel.

The event is free.

A Festival That Could Only Really Happen Here

There’s also plenty happening between the scheduled sessions.

Bank Square Books is operating a pop-up bookstore at the festival’s NESS Centennial Hub. An exhibition runs at La Grua Center. Merrill and Merrill Fellow books will be displayed at the Stonington Free Library.

The New England Science & Sailing Foundation Centennial Hub at 70 Water Street serves as festival headquarters from 8 a.m.–5 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m.–4 p.m. Sunday, with information, assistance, festival tote bags and keepsake programs while supplies last.

Most daytime venues are close enough to navigate on foot, which may be the festival’s smartest curatorial decision.

People will leave a discussion about Merrill, walk down the same narrow Borough streets he walked, pass the building where he lived, look toward the water that surrounded his daily life and then enter another room for another part of the story.

For one weekend, the separation between literary festival, historic house and historic village largely disappears.

More information is available at the Event Website link below.

To purchase tickets or register for free programs, click the Event Ticketing link below.

Details

Event: Stonington Literary Festival: James Merrill Centennial
Dates: Friday, Oct. 2–Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026
Location: Multiple venues throughout Stonington Borough
Festival Focus: Centennial celebration of poet James Merrill’s life, work and legacy
Scale: More than 300 attendees expected, 40-plus presenters and approximately 30 events across seven venues
Programming: Readings, panel discussions, writing workshops, concerts, open mic, literary walking tours, cemetery tours, James Merrill House tours, exhibition, bookstore and community gatherings
Friday: Merrill Fellows Reading, followed by Matthew Aucoin and Nicholas Phan’s Merrill Songs concert and reception
Saturday Sessions: 9–10 a.m., 11 a.m.–noon and 2–3 p.m., followed by Henri Cole’s 5 p.m. keynote and the Centennial Celebration Dinner
Sunday: James Merrill and His World panels at 10 a.m.; lunch; Hilton Als at 2 p.m.; Water Street reading at 3 p.m.
Centennial Hub: NESS, 70 Water Street, Stonington
Hub Hours: Saturday 8 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sunday 9 a.m.–4 p.m.
Individual Saturday Sessions: Generally $25; some programs are free
Friday Concert: $75 general admission; $50 former fellows and session leaders
Saturday Celebration Dinner: $175 regular admission; $100 session leaders and former fellows
Sunday Sessions: Generally $25 unless otherwise noted
Students: Complimentary admission to Saturday and Sunday daytime Centennial events with promo code STUDENT; valid student ID may be requested
Registration: Required for every event, including free programs
Ticket Limit: Saturday block sessions are limited to two tickets per order
Sold-Out Events: Waitlist available when indicated
Livestreaming: Many La Grua Center programs will be livestreamed
Walking Tours: $25; generally capped at 20 participants with a five-person minimum
Merrill Apartment Tours: Free with registration; maximum 20 per tour
Accessibility: The Portuguese Holy Ghost Society, NESS and James Merrill Apartment are listed by organizers as not wheelchair accessible
Merrill House Accessibility: Apartment access requires climbing steep stairs; there is no elevator
Transportation: Most daytime venues are within walking distance in Stonington Borough; complimentary shuttle service is available for the Saturday Celebration Dinner
Refunds: Ticket sales are final; no refunds or exchanges
Schedule: Programming is subject to change

Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.