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Free and open to the public. There will be a welcome reception and book signing at 5 P.M. All are welcome. 

Stephen King has published close to 70 books in the last 50 years. In 2021, he and his wife Tabitha collected all of his available manuscript drafts into a secure, climate-controlled archive attached to their home in Bangor, Maine. Bicks was the first scholar to be granted extended access to this treasure trove of materials. She'll discuss what she discovered about King’s writing process when she tracked the handwritten changes he made (macro and granular) to some of his most iconic works from the 1970s—the ones that scared her the most as a teenager. She’ll also talk about the conversations she had with King along the way, and share never-before-seen alternative endings she found to books like The Shining and Carrie. 

Biography

Caroline Bicks is the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern culture, and horror. Her books include Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England and Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (co-authored with her Everyday Shakespeare podcast partner, Michelle Ephraim). Her USA Today Bestselling book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026), chronicles the year she spent reading early drafts of King's iconic 1970s stories after he and his wife Tabitha granted her extended access to their personal archive in Bangor. Bicks's shorter nonfiction has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Writers Chronicle, The Financial Times, and elsewhere.

Suggested Reading

Bicks, Caroline. Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Hogarth, 2026.

Address

716 Stevens Avenue
Portland, ME 04103
United States

cgh@une.edu