Poetry at Magazine Beach Park: Maru Colbert, Hilary Sallick, Mark Stevick

The NEPC is delighted to be invited back to Mass Audubon’s Magazine Beach Park Nature Center in Cambridge. The event is free of charge and the venue is accessible. Registration is required (https://www.massaudubon.org/programs/magazine-beach/92363-nature-poetry-readings). Please join us!

Maru Colbert is an engineering professor and performer. Her collegiate research and teaching span three engineering fields and she has a K12 STEM focus on chemistry and mathematics. Her spoken, written and choreographed works were featured in Denver, Los Angeles, Toronto, Windsor, Montreal, Amsterdam, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit and Boston.  Her African and Native American culture, intrinsic motivation and daily reflection inform her writing, singing, acting, instrumentation and design.  Being a double winner with her Ekphrastic entries for the MA Poetry Festival in 2021 was a great honor.  Whatever she presents in any art form is, ultimately, “what her soul releases”.

Hilary Sallick is the author of three poetry collections: love is a shore (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023), which is on the long-list for the Massachusetts Book Award in poetry; Asking the Form (Cervena Barva Press, 2020); and Winter Roses (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems appear in appear or are forthcoming in Permafrost, Potomac Review, Jet Fuel Review, Notre Dame Review, Ibbetson Street, Small Orange, and other journals. A teacher with a longtime focus on adult literacy, she lives and works in Somerville, and she serves on the Board of the New England Poetry Club. (www.hilarysallick.com)

Mark Wacome Stevick grew up in Amish country, Pennsylvania. He came north for college and got his master’s in creative writing from BU. Now he teaches at Gordon College and produces the Five Ponds Creative Writing Festival and the Princemere Poetry Prize. His poems have won awards from Wundor Editions, Literal Latte, The Shine Journal, SWINK, Wild Plum, and The Baltimore Review. A chapbook, Local Habitations, won the Wil Mills Award and was published by Moonstone Press (2022). His plays include Cry Innocent and Goodnight, Captain White, which run seasonally in Salem, and The Sheep Mysteries, which is performed in Orvieto, Italy, where he sometimes leads a month-long workshop on ekphrasis. He’s a recent-ish StorySlam winner at The Moth in Boston, and he lives with his wife and kids in Salem.