NEPC @ The Menino: Jean Flanagan, Kevin Carey, Colleen Michaels

Join the New England Poetry Club on May 10, as we return to the Menino Arts Center, in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The reading begins at 2:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public. An open mic will follow the featured poets. The Menino Arts Center, located 26 Central Avenue, is an accessible venue, with a wheelchair ramp into the building and an elevator to the second floor. We’re grateful to Home Scholars of Boston for their generous sponsorship.

Jean Flanagan is the author of two books of poetry:  Ibbetson Street (Garden Street Press) and Black Lightning (Cedar Hill Books).  Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including recently in Nixes Mate Review and in the Broken Cord, published by Two Dogs Press. Flanagan teaches in an alternative sentencing program called “Changing Lives Through Literature”. She is one of the founders of the Arlington Center for the Arts and the Poet Laureate of Arlington, Massachusetts.

Kevin Carey’s books include the poetry collections The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy, Set in Stone, the co-written Olympus Heights, and the collaboration Revere Beach Stories: Poems and Photographs. He has published three works of fiction:  The Beach People, Murder in the Marsh and a new novel Junior Miles and the Junkman (Regal House / Fitzroy Books) which won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers and has been chosen for the Pen Faulkner Writers in the Schools Program in Washington, DC. Kevin is the co-founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag. A new co-directed film MFA: The Terminal Degree, a murder mystery comedy, will premiere April 30th at Cinema Salem, Salem, MA. https://kevincareywriter.com/

Colleen Michaels is the author of Prize Wheel (Small Bites Press, 2023) which was a finalist for the Paterson Prize, and coauthor, along with Kevin Carey, of the chapbook, Olympus Heights (Lily Poetry Review, 2023). She is a winner of the 2024 Ginsberg Poetry Prize and a 2024 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals.  Her poems have been commissioned as installations for The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, The Peabody Essex Museum, and The Trustees of Reservations. She directs the Writing Studio at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she began the Improbable Places Poetry Tour, bringing poetry to unlikely places like tattoo parlors, laundromats, airports, and swimming pools. Yes, in the pool.