Gray Jacobik’s upcoming show, “Lines Spoken in Paint, Wax and Words,” at Maple and Main Gallery in Chester will feature something unique: an exhibition that showcases both art and poetry. Jacobik will pair her writing with her paintings, using works that represent compatible themes in different artistic forms.

The poetry in the current show comes from Jacobik’s latest book, “The Banquet: New & Selected Poems,” which won the 2016 William Meredith Award for poetry. The prize is named for the late Pulitzer Prize winner William Meredith, who taught for many years at Connecticut College in New London.

The Meredith prize is the latest in a string that Jacobik has won, among them a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Yeats prize, the Juniper Prize and the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Award.

“I was chosen out of the blue; I guess they found me because of my reputation. I was dumbfounded,” Jacobik says of the Meredith award.

But that’s not the way her poetry career began. She submitted her work to contests for some 17 years before she won anything at all. In the process, she even abandoned the use of her first name. It is Jane, but she adopted her middle name, Gray, because she says she wanted to guard against a bias directed at women writers.

“When I sent work out for publication, I wanted a name that sounded gender neutral,” she explains.

Often, publishers changed the gender neutrality themselves, sending her replies that reversed the middle letters of her name to “Gary.”

Jacobik explains that winning a prize in a poetry contest can be crucial to having a book published in an academic or literary press. Since poetry does not make money for publishers, they charge “reading fees” to poets to enter contests and then publish the winners. When Jacobik started out some 30 years ago, the fees ran to $25. Now, she says, they can be hundreds of dollars.

For Jacobik, as she progressed as a poet, failure to win a prize was more than a bit awkward. She was already an English professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.

“I was an academic, and to be promoted, to get tenure, you’ve got to be published in the literary press, and the way to get published is to win contests,” she says. “It became embarrassing. I had been a poet in residence, a professor of poetry, and I didn’t have a book.”

Now she has five published books, among them “Little Boy Blue,” an account of a troubled relationship with her son, to whom she had not spoken for two years when she composed the poems in 2006.

“At the time I wrote it, I didn’t know if I would ever see him again, and I wrote because I wanted to tell my side of the story,” she recalls.

The two, she added, have since reconciled, though she doubts her book had anything to do with it.

In addition to her published work, Jacobik is particularly interested in a series of poems that have not yet been published, a poetic interpretation of key moments in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. Jacobik became fascinated by Roosevelt after listening to “No Ordinary Time,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Jacobik listened to the book as she drove to work at Eastern.

“I was riveted by Eleanor, impelled by curiosity to read more,” she says. “I read many books and became immersed in her life, not as a biographer but as a poet, imaginatively.”

The framework of the Jacobik’s narrative is an interview with Roosevelt at the end of her life.

Jacobik did not start her professional career as either a poet or an artist. After graduating from Goucher College, she worked as an environmental lobbyist. Her art and her poetry, she points out, still take inspiration from the natural world. She painted on her own until her Washington, D.C., apartment couldn’t accommodate both painting equipment and family. Then she turned to poetry, not painting for more than a decade.

As a painter, Jacobik uses varying media. The cover of “The Banquet” is an oil painting she did herself, a copy of a still life by Caravaggio. She also uses acrylic and encaustic, a technique that employs a blend of beeswax and resin mixed with pigment to create fused layers of color. Her studio has a number of items that laymen do not usually associate with art production: an electric frying pan for melting the wax; a large hot tray to keep the waxy paint from hardening; and a heat gun to create different textures on the surface of the painting. She has some small wood shims so she can elevate one side of the work to have the hot wax drip down, as well as carving and shaving tools to shape the wax.

Today, at Jacobik’s home in Deep River, her art studio is next to her writing desk, but now there is enough room for both. In fact, she would like to use the upcoming exhibit in Chester as a way to bring words and images closer together in her own life, “so I don’t have to abandon one to do the other,” she explains.

And she hopes viewers of the new show will appreciate the dual experience.

“If a reader of a poem or a viewer of a painting has a beautiful encounter, I will be happy,” she says.

Jacobik will read selections from her poetry at Maple & Main Gallery, 1 Maple St., Chester, at 7 p.m. Aug. 25 and participate in a group reading at the gallery at 7 p.m. Aug. 10. The show runs until Aug. 31. Hours are noon-6 p.m. Wed. and Thurs., noon-7 p.m. Fri. and Sat., and 10 a.m-6 p.m. Sun. For more information, send an email to mapleandmain@att.net or call (860) 526-6065.

The Breakfast Room

She has looked at him in the way of fire, of roses,

in light that spills suspension onto morning’s table,

room with the fricative name, room of luxury

come round as if they were stars from the forties,

he in satin robe, one hand on the folded paper

and unopened mail, she in silk kimono and beaded

slippers. Silver service on a silver tray and the

firewalk of deathlessness that comes between them.

Light buffs the mahogany amber, biscuits and honey

and cream, coffee and bacon, daisies in a willowware

pitcher, an open window, and beyond, the garden

perfectly tended, yesterday’s blooms open and buds

to unfold today, each cupping small prisms, the fire

of light that comes in July, in June, and fire that is

intelligence, the self ’s story of life, fire as it gambols

along the strands of love that flow from one person’s

eyes to another’s, fire that rushes the skin’s galvanized