Poetry at the Manse: Martha Collins, Merryn Rutledge, Timothy Gager

Join the New England Poetry Club outdoors in the open air tent at the Old Manse for free poetry readings on select Sunday afternoons.

Extend your visit by signing up for a tour of the historic house prior to or following the reading. Learn more about tour offerings and pre-register for house tours here. Plan to come early or stay late for a stroll around the orchard and along the banks of the Concord River.

April poets:

Martha Collins has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019); the latter won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. She has co-translated five volumes of Vietnamese poetry, most recently Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung (Milkweed, 2023), and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries  (Graywolf, 2017).  Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com.

Bestselling author Timothy Gager has published 18 books of fiction and poetry, which includes his latest novel, Joe the Salamander. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over one thousand works of fiction and poetry published, eighteen nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated twice for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio. In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 150 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager. Timothy served as the Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review for ten years, and was the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Merryn Rutledge is a poet, reviewer, and teacher of poetry as craft. Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed (Kelsay Books, 2023) features poems about her forebears in the American South, challenges like grief, and reflections on the costs of racism.  Her poems have appeared widely in journals throughout the world and in several anthologies, such as All Shall Be Well (Amythest Press, 2023), an anthology celebrating the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. Merryn’s reviews of new poetry books by women have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly and Pedestal, for example. After earning a Masters and BA with honors in English from Smith College, Merryn taught literature, writing, and film studies at Phillips Exeter Academy. In a second career, she earned a doctorate in leadership and led a national leadership development consulting firm. During that period, essays based on her field research on leadership were published in the peer-reviewed journals and in books. Merryn enjoys working for social justice causes, singing, dancing, and playing on the shore near her home south of Boston.