Ambler’s Dr. Michelle Reale, a professor at Arcadia University and avid writer, has been named the 2026 poet laureate for Montgomery County. The Poet Laureate serves as poetry ambassador for one year in Montgomery County and helps plan readings, workshops and a community service project to elevate literary arts. Reale has written multiple books across genres, including two ethnographies on refugees in Sicily.

Most of Reale’s work centers on her experiences as an Italian American growing up in Ambler. She has lived her whole life in the borough and details her childhood in pieces like “I Just Want to Go Home – Moving, Loss and Unacknowledged Grief.” Her upcoming poetry collection, “Beautiful Lying Disguise,” will focus on the asbestos industry’s history in Ambler and the physical and emotional contamination it left behind.

Her other poems deal with themes of loss, history and heritage, which can be read in her poetry collections “The Season of Subtraction” and “Let it be Extravagant.” The following is an excerpt from Reale’s piece “Fessura”:

“All those buttons on all those blouses and the fingers are constantly in motion. Half-cooked meals are interrupted by feverish bellowing, invoking the flight of swallows, a heartsick longing for the conveyance of swift flight to the familiar and terrible, the place where you cannot return.”

For her year-long service project, Reale aims to make poetry more accessible. She is collaborating with local libraries and organizations to bring poetry and creative writing to those who may not have had the opportunity to engage with it otherwise. To read some of Reale’s work and learn more about her service project, visit the web page here: Michelle Reale, 2026 Montgomery County Poet Laureate | Montgomery County Poet Laureate.

Photo – Montgomery County Poet Laureate program