Poet Laureate Program
Furthering Amesbury’s poetic legacy
Amesbury’s Poet Laureate Program was established in 2014, building upon a foundation established by local 19th-century Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier.
In partnership with the John Greenleaf Whittier Home and City of Amesbury, the Amesbury Cultural Council is pleased to provide support to Amesbury's fifth Poet Laureate, Bryan Riley. Bryan will serve through January 2028.
Like the Poet Laureate Facebook page for the latest happenings, upcoming events and readings.
What does a Poet Laureate do?
"As Poet Laureate, my mission is to support poets from Amesbury and the local area, bring a diverse range of established and promising poets to Amesbury audiences, and foster literary citizenship and community."
–Lisa Usani Phillips, Amesbury Poet Laureate 2024–2026
Meet Bryan Riley
Amesbury’s fifth Poet Laureate, 2026–Present
Bryan Riley, Amesbury’s fifth Poet Laureate and the originator of the program, has been writing poetry for over 45 years. Having served on the Cultural Council for a collective 7+ years, he has been instrumental to our local poetry community. Using his pen-name Bryan P.T. Riley (the P.T. being a reference to Prime Time Poets), he has 18 self-published volumes of poetry including Poems for the Clinically Insane and Seven Degrees, as well as a novel, Crispy the Impaler (And other tales of "Whoa! What?").
Riley has received the Readers' Choice, Critics’ Choice, and the Editor’s Choice Awards from National Library of Poetry, and saw his works included in an anthology that was sent to the moon (yes, really!) via the Writers on the Moon Project.
He has invented a new poetic form, known as the Amesbury Form, which is included in his upcoming volume of poetry, and is most thrilled to have been chosen as the Poet Laureate at the tenth anniversary of its inception.
Poet Laureate Retrospective: Thank You
It has been an honor and a joy to serve as Amesbury’s fourth poet laureate over the past two years. I am grateful for the opportunity to meet so many wonderful poets, to experience their poetry firsthand in our city, and to be a part of a thriving literary and arts community with all of you.
To Poet Laureate Support Committee members past and present: thank you for this amazing opportunity and for all of your support and hard work on behalf of the program. I am proud of what we were able to achieve together. To Poet Laureate Support Committee Chair and ACC Liaison Bryan Riley: Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do to make your vision of the program come to life. To Ellie O’Leary, Amesbury Poet Laureate Emerita, Support Committee Chair, and ACC member: A huge thank you. And I am profoundly grateful that our program continues to benefit from the incredible legacy of poetry, community building, and literary citizenship left to us by the late Amesbury Poets Laureate Emeriti Lainie Seneschal and Stephen Wagner.
To the Amesbury Cultural Council, John Greenleaf Whittier Home, Amesbury Public Library, and Mayor Kassandra Gove: Thank you for your generous support and for giving the poet laureate program a home in Amesbury. To the ACC Communications team, Bailey Campbell, Rachel Wallace, and Margaret Leahy: Thank you for your beautifully designed newsletters, web pages, and event flyers, and all of your work promoting the poet laureate program. To Aimie Westphal, Library Director and City Liaison for the ACC: Thank you for your expertise on how to do things the right way, your institutional knowledge, and research on best practices, all of which have strengthened the program for my term and beyond. I am also extremely grateful to library staff members Stephanie Smith, Assistant Director; Clare Dombrowski, Head of Youth Services and current Poet Laureate Support Committee member; and Meghan Fahey, Head of Archives & Special Collections: Thank you all for your enthusiastic support and collaboration.
Here’s what we accomplished together:
Hosted 30 featured poets at the Amesbury Monthly Poetry Readings
Established readers’ honorariums with ACC funding
Made readings more accessible (Zoom captioning, Costello Center)
Celebrated National Poetry Month in 2024 and 2025:
Cohosted the Art + Poetry Celebration: Ekphrastic
Poetry with Alchemy + Art in April 2024Hosted the Amesbury Poetry Festival in April 2025 at
BareWolf, featuring ten Amesbury poetsSponsored Amesbury Public Library’s Story Walks
Revised the Poet Laureate Support Committee Guidelines
Raised funds for the program through a Flatbread Pizza
fundraiser in July 2025
Here's what I was able to do as laureate with your support:
Wrote occasional poems for Mayor Gove’s 2024 inauguration,
Lainie Seneschal’s memorial reading, the Amesbury Rotary's 100th
Anniversary, and Stuart Atkins’s 100th birthdayTaught a generative writing workshop at Amesbury Public Library
Participated in the Poet Laureate Panel hosted by Brockton's Poet
Laureate (reading and discussion)Read at the Rotary Club, Creative Haverhill, Gloucester Writers’ Center,
and Amesbury's first Juneteenth celebration
With the utmost gratitude,
Lisa
Lisa Usani Phillips
Amesbury Poet Laureate (2024-26)
Meet Lisa Usani Phillips
Amesbury’s fourth Poet Laureate, 2024–2026
The fourth Amesbury Poet Laureate, Lisa Usani Phillips, was born in 1970 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and spent much of her youth in Manchester, Connecticut. After receiving an MFA in writing from Emerson College in Boston, she lived in Roslindale, Massachusetts, before moving to downtown Amesbury in 2004.
A longtime writer and editor, Lisa edited textbooks for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson before becoming an instructor and marketing communications specialist for Crafters Quarters, a local fiber-arts studio. She has worked as a senior content editor at EBSCO Information Services in Ipswich since 2011. Her debut hybrid poetry collection, Guest People, was published by Wheeling Tern Books in October 2022.
Some Amesbury residents may recognize Phillips as the companion of her dog, Lloyd (2007-2020), a Great Pyrenees mix whom some hailed as the city’s unofficial canine mayor. Phillips and her husband, Justin Harris, moved to Amesbury’s Point Shore neighborhood in 2019, where they live with a family of four cats, the Marmingtons.
Ellie O’Leary
Amesbury’s third Poet Laureate, 2020–2024 (two terms)
Ellie O’Leary, 71, grew up in Freedom, Maine, and moved to Amesbury in 1986. The mother of three worked as a real estate agent in the city for many years and now teaches workshops for first-time homebuyers. “I have got to be the most business-minded writer that I know,” O’Leary said. “I have all of my poems on a spreadsheet.”
O’Leary moved back to Maine in 2004 and hosted “The Writers Forum” on community radio station WERU-FM and taught writing at Senior College at Belfast. She also co-founded the Fall Writerfest at the Pyramid Life Center in Paradox, New York. “I probably really got started writing in 1996,” O’Leary said. “I always wanted to be a writer, but I thought you had to somehow be chosen as a writer. Then, I decided to just start writing.”
O’Leary received the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance’s Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship in poetry in 2013 and moved back to Amesbury in 2017. In 2020, the author saw her poetry manuscript “Breathe Here” published by North Country Press.
“It’s a validation,” O’Leary said. “You like your own work anyway but when someone picks it up for publication, especially if it is a really attractive publication, it is just good to see. Your real estate friends will always love it. But they’re not quite sure what they are reading. They just think it’s nice.”
O’Leary holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Southern Maine.
(Excerpted and condensed from a 2020 Newburyport News article by Jim Sullivan.)
Stephen R. Wagner
Amesbury’s second Poet Laureate, 2018–2020
As an office administrator at an energy efficiency consulting firm, Wagner began his literary career by firing back original poetry to his engineers who kept submitting late time sheets. Encouraged by his co-workers, Wagner turned his office notes into the independently published poetry book, "Time Sheets: A Collection of Poems," which was published in 2014.
Lainie Senechal
Amesbury’s first Poet Laureate, 2016–2018
An Amesbury native, Senechal spent just about her whole life living in the city. She worked throughout Massachusetts as a teacher and a poet and was prolific in authoring poetry books, anthologies and journal articles. She was the co-founder, with Michael Brown, of The Culture of Peace, an art and poetry exhibit of international artists/poets to celebrate the United Nations mandate for a Decade of Peace.
Senechal is also the co-founder, with Harris Gardner, of Tapestry of Voices, a Greater Boston organization whose mission is to “weave poetry into the social fabric.”
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