The Poet and the Poem
2025-26 Series
Featured Winifred Hughes
Click here for Winifred Hughes podcast.mp3
Winifred (Winnie) Hughes is a reformed academic and active birder living in Princeton, NJ. Winnie comes from a "whole family of scribblers": her mother Josephine Nicholls Hughes was a poet, her father Riley Hughes, a novelist, and her three siblings, all writers, including her sister Hildred Crill, a poet who lives in Stockholm. Currently she teaches nature writing and ecopoetry at the Watershed Institute in Pennington, NJ, and leads many bird walks in the local open spaces. She is author of two prize-wining chapbooks, Frost Flowers (2019) and Nine-Bend Bridge (2015). The Village of New Ghosts is her first full-length collection of poetry.
Winnie is a longtime member of U.S. 1 Poets Cooperative, established in the 70s, dedicated to fostering new poets. She was married to the late Fred Spar; their two grown sons are Adam and Alex Spar.