NEPC @ the BPL: Lynne Viti, Chris O’Carroll, Shanta Lee

The NEPC is delighted to return to the Boston Public Library, Jamaica Plain Branch, for our third event there this year! The reading, on Saturday, October 11 at 3:00 pm, will be free and open to the public. The JP Branch, at 30 South Street, is an accessible venue.

Shanta Lee is a visual artist, writer across genres, author, and public intellectual who often says she is a “…practitioner of entanglement” for all of the ways she brings things together in her work. Winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Grant for Poetic Achievement, Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award, and a 2024-25 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow, her work has been widely featured in addition to her published books. Her professional work has included public health, non-profits, education, arts administration, and other areas. Lee’s recent work includes a co-edited a critical anthology with Philip Brady, Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition (Etruscan Press, 2025). The work features interviews with 40+ writers and authors across different mediums and genres who were all invited to choose the “one page that sings” from among their work. To explore  more, visit Shantalee.com.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of three books, The Joke’s on Me, Abracadabratude, and Quantum Creed, which includes a selection of his recent hell-yes-I-can-be-funny-about-having-cancer poems.  He has been a Light magazine featured poet, and his work appears in New York City Haiku, Extreme Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.

Lynne Viti is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Walk to Cefalù (Cornerstone Press, 2022). Her work has received recognition in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, WOMR/Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, Miriam Chaikin/Westbeth Artists Poetry Award, Tucson Festival of Books, Highland Park Poetry and Hale Education Poem of the Year. A faculty emerita at Wellesley College, she facilitates a poets in the schools project in Westwood, Massachusetts and serves on the advisory board of the New England Poetry Club. She served as the inaugural poet laureate of Westwood, Massachusetts,  2023-2025.