NEPC in Worcester: Carla Schwartz, Carolyn Oliver, Anne Elezabeth Pluto

Please join the New England Poetry Club on February 23, 2025, as we partner with the Worcester County Poetry Association for a reading at the Salisbury House! The reading, beginning at 3:00 pm, is free and open to the public. The Salisbury House is located at 61 Harvard Street in Worcester, Mass. The building has limited access, with steps leading to the entrance.

Filmmaker and photographer Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet (Diane Lockward, ed.) and in her collections Signs of Marriage (Finishing Line), Intimacy with the Wind (Finishing Line), and Mother, One More Thing (Turning Point). Learn more at  carlapoet.com, or find her on X, YouTube, Threads, BlueSky, or Instagram all @cb99videos. Recent and future curations include Banyan Review, Cutthroat, Contemporary Haibun Online, Gone Lawn, great weather for MEDIA, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, New-Verse News, One Art Haiku Anthology, Paterson Literary Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Spank the Carp, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Triggerfish Critical Review, The MacGuffin, Worcester Review, and Leon. Schwartz’s poem “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre, 2024); Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry; and three chapbooks, including, most recently, Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), which was selected for the Rane Arroyo Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, TriQuarterly, Copper Nickel, Image, Consequence, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and by Mount Auburn Cemetery’s artist-in-residence program. Her honors include the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the NEPC’s E. E. Cummings Prize, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Anne Elezabeth Pluto grew up in Brooklyn, NY before it was cool. She is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.  She is an alumna of Shakespeare & Company and was a member of the Worcester Shakespeare Company 2011 – 2016. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and is one of the founders and editors at Nixes Mate Review and Nixes Mate Books.  She has two full-length collections The Deepest Part of Dark, Unlikely Stories Press, NOLA (2020), and How Many Miles to Babylon?, Lily Books (2023).