NEPC and Beehive Poetry: Jason O’Toole, John Pijewski

The NEPC’s partnership with the Beehive Poetry Group concludes in April, with a reading presented by Jean Flanagan, the Arlington, Massachusetts Poet Laureate Emerita. This month’s event features Jason O’Toole and John Pijewski.

The event is free and open to the public. The Robbins Library is an accessible venue.

Open-mic reading slots are on a first-come, first-served basis and open 15 minutes before the start time. Sign up to read, or attend and enjoy a night of poetry!

Jason O’Toole is Poet Laureate Emeritus of North Andover, MA. His collections include The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted (Dead Man’s Press, 2025), and the chapbook Enragés (Between Shadows Press, 2025). He serves on the advisory board of the New England Poetry Club, and as treasurer of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco. He is the winner of the 2025 Amy Lowell Prize and has been nominated for the Rhysling and the Pushcart Prize.  He was the co-founder of the Anne Bradstreet Prize and serves as judge for the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize and the Capital District Slam Poetry Festival in NY.  Recent poems and prose have appeared in the anthology Love is for All of Us (Storey Publishing), as well as Ghost City Press, The Somerville Times, Phil Lit, Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and Deceleration News.

John Pijewski was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1952. He graduated from Boston University, the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and attended Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. His book of poems, Dinner with Uncle Jozef, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1982. He received a writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1984.

John taught Creative Writing as an adjunct professor for 35 years at Boston University, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the University of Southern Maine in Portland.  His poems have been published in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Tri-Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The New Yorker, and other journals.

John describes the poems in his new book, Collected Father, as existing in the province between Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, in which an abandoned boy tries to survive on his own in the brutal peasant culture of Poland during WW II, and Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father.