Poetry at the Manse: Mary Bonina, Patty Crane, Thomas Olivieri

Please join us at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., for our first 2024-25 season events hosted by The Trustees!

Mary Bonina was finalist for the Goldfarb Fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and awarded several residencies, including at the VCCA retreat, Moulin a Nef, in Auvillar, France. Her newly released poetry collection, Lunch in Chinatown, includes Bonina’s poem, “Drift,” winner of the Boston Contemporary Authors Prize, which is engraved on a granite monolith, a permanent public art installation outside a busy subway station. Previous publications include My Father’s Eyes: a Memoir and two other poetry collections—Living Proof and Clear Eye Tea, all from Červená Barva Press, which will also publish her novel, My Way Home in 2025. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Lowell Review, Hanging Loose, Poets and Writers, Salamander, Mom Egg, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, and many other journals, and her work has been included in several anthologies, including Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. Angelo from Wavertree Press.

Patty Crane is the author of BELL I WAKE TO (Zone 3 Press First Book Award, 2019) and something flown (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, 2018), and translator of THE BLUE HOUSE: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and BRIGHT SCYTHE (Sarabande Books, 2015), her selected translations of the Swedish Nobel laureate. Her poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in 32 Poems, Poetry Daily, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Vox. Her translations have recently appeared in American Poets, Poetry, Five Points, and Guernica. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and Hedgebrook. A third generation Cape Cod native, she divides her time between the hilltowns of western Massachusetts and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Thomas Olivieri is a flâneur who is a lifelong resident of Massachusetts. His two books, Swords Snakes & Shipwrecks: a Slight Collection of Hallowe’en Tales and Miscellanea and Kings, & Saints, & Knights have been published by Oldstyle Tales and Alien Buddha Presse respectively.