NEPC @ The Menino: Linda Haviland Conte, Jenny Grassl, Scott Ruescher

Join the New England Poetry Club on November 22, 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 at 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.

Linda Haviland Conte is the author of the full-length collection Seldom Purely and the chapbook Slow as a Poem (Ibbetson Street Press). Her work has appeared in the anthologies From the Farther Shore, Constellations, Bagels with the Bards, and Connecticut River Review.  Linda has been featured in Verse Daily and WCAI’s Poetry Sunday. Her poems have received recognition from state and national poetry societies.  Linda serves on the board of The New England Poetry Club. (lindaconte.net)

Jenny Grassl lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Ocean State Review, The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Radar Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Laurel Review, and others. She was a runner-up for The Boston Review Annual Prize, selected by Mary Jo Bang, and a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Magicholia, her first book, was published in 2024 by 3: A Taos Press. Her second book, Forever Mistaken for Ourselves, won publication by Tupelo Press in their July Open Reading period and is forthcoming in 2026.

Scott Ruescher is the author of two full-length collections—Above the Fold, published by Finishing Line Press in April 2025, and Waiting for the Light to Change, published by Prolific Press in 2017—and at least two or three chapbooks. Several years ago, and twice in a row, he won the New England Poetry Club’s now-defunct Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His new poems have been appearing in Black Horse Review, Muleskinner Journal, Pangyrus, Poets Against Racism and Hate, The Somerville News, and The Lantern—the online magazine of the Colby Museum of Art. In retirement from higher education administration and teaching jobs, he writes promotional copy for an affordable housing nonprofit and works in ESOL and citizenship classrooms in the immigrant communities on the “near North Shore” of Boston.