Poetry at Magazine Beach Park: Jane Attanucci, Charlot Lucien, Lawrence Kessenich

Please join the NEPC as we continue our summer at Mass Audubon’s Magazine Beach Park Nature Center in Cambridge! The event is free of charge and the venue is accessible.

Jane Attanucci grew up as one of eight children in an Irish Catholic family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She moved to Boston to attend college and graduate school. Upon retirement from college teaching, she studied poetry at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Attanucci is the author of a chapbook, First Mud (Finishing Line, 2015) and a full-length collection, A River Within Spills Light (Turning Point, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Thrush Poetry Journal and Writer’s Almanac among others. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Lawrence Kessenich won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize in Ireland. His poetry has been published in Sewanee Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review and many other magazines. He has two poetry chapbooks, Pearland Strange News, and three full-length poetry books, Before Whose Glory, Age of Wonders, and Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. Three of his poems were read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. Kessenich has also published essays, including one read on NPR’s This I Believe, and has had plays produced at festivals in Boston, New York and Durango, Colorado. He has published one novel, Cinnamon Girl, and his second novel, The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller will be published in the fall of 2024.

Charlot Lucien is a storyteller, poet, and visual artist who resides in Massachusetts. His writings have been published in various anthologies and publications, including This Land, My Beloved (A Trilingual Anthology of Contemporary Haitian Poetry), Liberation Poetry, Compost Magazine, Revolution, Regard, Anthologie des poètes français 2022, Poètes à la Une, and Tanbou Magazine. His poetry book La tentation de l’autre rive (The Temptation of Other Shores) was released in 2013 by Trilingual Press.  As the founder of the Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts, he has prefaced the art anthology Migrating Colors: Haitian Art in New England, released in 2018.

Several of his poems express his grappling with expressions of multiple identities as a Haitian living in the US, while acknowledging the influences of his motherland and a poetic education initially influenced by Haitian and French literature.   Other poems or writings reflect his attempts at giving meaning, through poetry, to the historical roots of the struggles for civil rights and racial harmony.

In his regular line of work, Charlot Lucien is a public health manager for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a history lecturer at the OLLI Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Boston.