NEPC @ The Menino: Barbara Cassidy, Jennifer M Phillips, Vijaya Sundaram
2026-05-16 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Menino Arts Center, 26 Central Avenue, Hyde Park, MA, 02136, United States
On May 16, please join the New England Poetry Club in a return to the Menino Arts Center in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The reading begins at 3:00 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.
Barbara Cassidy is a poet, singer-songwriter, and Sean-nós singer who resides in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Open Doors Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, The Stonecoast Review, on the 2023/2025 Martin Poetry Path in Newton, among others, and have been set to music by composer Eric Chasalow. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook, Divination (Dancing Girl Press, 2026).
Jennifer M Phillips is a boundary-crosser, retired skydiver, and bonsai-grower, and has authored three chapbooks, Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity, A Song of Ascents, and Sailing to the Edges, and a collection, Wrestling with the Angel. Phillips’ work has appeared in over 140 journals, recently Spoon River Poetry Review, London Grip, and The Alembic), and was thrice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and an Eyelands Book Prize. She is moved to write poetry these days by changing landscapes during climate shift and the need for a new communitarianism to forge connections in our time of fragmentation.
Vijaya Sundaram is an Indian-born, Medford-based poet, musician, artist, and community college professor. She served as Medford’s second Poet Laureate between 2023-2025. Her first collection of poems, Fractured Lens, was published in 2023 by Červená Barva Press. Her second poetry book, Reverberations, was published in 2025 by Ibbetson Street Press. Aside from poems, she has written short stories, plays, and a short novel. Her poetry and short pieces have appeared in publications like The Rising Phoenix Press, the Stardust Review, and TELL Magazine, among others. She has read her poems at poetry events in and around the Boston and Greater Boston areas, and currently runs an Open Mic for Poetry and Original Song at the Arts Collaborative Medford, as well as a Medford Poetry Club at the Medford Public Library. She is a recipient of the Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals for 2026.

Poetry at the Manse: Diana Cole, Paula J. Lambert, Gail Hanlon
2026-05-31 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
The NEPC’s 2026 season at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., kicks off on Sunday, May 31. This free reading will be held under a tent outdoors, at an accessible venue.
Make a day of it! Arrive early or linger after the reading to explore the orchard, stroll along the Concord River, or enjoy a picnic on the grounds. You can also deepen your visit by joining a guided tour of the historic house before or after the event.
Learn more and pre-register for a tour: https://thetrustees.org/place/the-old-manse/.
Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has been published in over 60 poetry journals, including Poetry East, Spillway, The Public’s Radio 89.3, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, and Orison Books. For five years, she was a senior editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal. In 2025, she was awarded first place in the Notable Works Poetry Initiative, judged by Tina Cane, RI Poet Laureate Emerita. As a singer and vocal coach based in Massachusetts for over 40 years, she offers workshops to poets in Reading Aloud. In addition to her writing, she is a stained-glass artist working in Warren, RI. To connect artists and poets, she organizes Ekphrastic events for various galleries in Rhode Island. Her chapbook, Songs by Heart, was published by Iris Press, and in 2018 her full-length book, Between Selves, was released in 2023 by Indian Press (Cyberwit.net). More information at dianacolepoets.com.
Paula J. Lambert has published five full-length poetry collections, including Terms of Venery, Revised (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025), and six chapbooks, including Sinkhole (Bottlecap Press 2025). Lambert, a native of Shirley, Massachusetts, and winner of the New England Poetry Club’s 2023 Amy Lowell Prize, is also a literary translator, small press publisher, and visual artist. Now living in Columbus, Ohio, her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her mentorship has been recognized by PEN America. She lives in Columbus with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com.
Gail Hanlon’s poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, CutbankOnline, The Iowa Review, Pittsburg Review, New Letters, Verse Daily, and BEST AMERICAN POETRY, among other journals and anthologies. She has published Silent Letter (Cornerstone 2023) and two chapbooks, and also edited Voicing Power: Conversations with Visionary Women. Her work received the National Writer’s Union Poetry Prize and has been shortlisted for the Iowa Review Award and CutBank’s Patricia Goedicke Prize, and long-listed for Cutbank’s Chapbook Award, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize at VERSE, and OSU’s The Journal Wheeler Prize, among others.

Poetry at the Manse: Carla Panciera, Ed Meek, James K. Zimmerman
2026-06-28 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
The NEPC’s 2026 season at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., continues on Sunday, June 28. This free reading will be held under a tent outdoors, at an accessible venue.
Make a day of it! Arrive early or linger after the reading to explore the orchard, stroll along the Concord River, or enjoy a picnic on the grounds. You can also deepen your visit by joining a guided tour of the historic house before or after the event.
Learn more and pre-register for a tour: https://thetrustees.org/place/the-old-manse/.
Carla Panciera was born on her family’s dairy farm in Westerly, Rhode Island. Her poetry collections include Cider Press Award Winner, One of the Cimalores, Bordighera Press Award Winner, No Day, No Dusk, No Love, and most recently, One Trail of Longing, Another of String (also Bordighera). Her short story collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Award and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also the author of Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the New England Review, Poetry, Spillway, Water~Stone Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review. Carla has received funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A retired high school English teacher, Panciera lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
Ed Meek’s fifth book of poetry is Great Pond. He is also the author of Luck, a collection of short stories. He has a memoir and a children’s book due out this summer. He writes book reviews for The Arts Fuse. He has had work in The Paris Review, The Sun, The Boston Globe, The North American Review, and The Baltimore Review, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at the Osher Institute.
James K. Zimmerman’s poetry appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, Reed, Salmagundi, and numerous other journals and anthologies. A thirteen-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his writing has won many awards, including the Edwin Markham, E.E. Cummings, Vern Cowles, Pat Schneider, and Hart Crane Prizes. He is the author of five books of poetry – most recently The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen, Uncertainty, and Unbroken Circle, Unending Thread. His poetry is featured on websites such as The Poetry Foundation and American Life in Poetry. He values his neurodivergence as an essential wellspring of his creative process.

Longfellow Summer Arts Festival: Tracy K. Smith
2026-07-12 15:00 - 16:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Join us at the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters for an afternoon with Tracy K. Smith! It’s the first event in our 2026 We (too) The People series.
Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator, and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, created the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.
Smith is the author of five poetry collections: Such Color: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2022 New England Book Award; Wade in the Water, which was awarded the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and The Body’s Question, which received the 2003 Cave Canem Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. She is the co-translator (with Changtai Bi) of My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei, which was a finalist for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize; and co-editor (with John Freeman) of There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Her memoir-manifesto, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, was a Time magazine and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times is a nonfiction celebration of poetry as a source of courage and emotional fortitude amidst the many upheavals of the 21st Century.
She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.
In case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors.

NEPC @ Chesterwood, with Patrick Donnelly and Cammy Thomas
2026-07-15 17:30 - 18:30 | Chesterwood, 4 Williamsville Road, Stockbridge, MA, 01262, United States
The New England Poetry Club is delighted to join forces with Chesterwood, the former summer home and studio of Daniel Chester French, for “We (too) the People: Voices from the New England Poetry Club.” This is the first of two NEPC events included in the 2026 ArtsAlive! series, held in Daniel Chester French’s studio. This month’s reading features NEPC members Patrick Donnelly and Cammy Thomas.
Admission (including refreshments): $10, National Trust for Historic Preservation members / $15 non-members.
Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025). Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is program director of The Frost Place, a center for poetry and the arts at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. More at: patrickdonnellypoetry.com
Cammy Thomas’s most recent work is Odysseus’ Daughter, poems written in response to the Odyssey (Parkman Press chapbook, 2023). Three previous poetry collections are published by Four Way Books. Cathedral of Wish received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Tremors received 2022 Poetry Honors from the Mass Book Awards. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete Inscriptions. Poems have recently appeared in Hampden-Sydney Review, Smartish Pace, Cider Press Review, J Journal, and The Baltimore Review. Her poem, “Far Past War,” was set to music by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, and premiered with the Cathedral Choral Society in Washington DC in 2022. She wrote her PhD dissertation on the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She lives near Boston, where she teaches literature to adults. www.cammythomas.com
Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) was the famed sculptor of the Minute Man for Concord, MA, and the seated Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Chesterwood is located in idyllic Stockbridge, MA with multiple buildings set within 122 acres. The site includes French’s Studio, the recently restored Colonial Revival Residence, and the gardens and woodland walks that he designed.
The Residence retains original antiques and decorative objects. French’s works are featured prominently throughout the property alongside paintings and sculptures by other prominent artists. For more information about a trip to Chesterwood, visit https://www.chesterwood.org/.

Poetry at the Manse: Wyn Cooper, Brian Mosher, Jhonny Victor
2026-07-19 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
The NEPC’s 2026 season at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., continues on Sunday, July 19. This free reading will be held under a tent outdoors, at an accessible venue.
Make a day of it! Arrive early or linger after the reading to explore the orchard, stroll along the Concord River, or enjoy a picnic on the grounds. You can also deepen your visit by joining a guided tour of the historic house before or after the event.
Learn more and pre-register for a tour: https://thetrustees.org/place/the-old-manse/.
Wyn Cooper has published six books of poetry, including, most recently, The Unraveling. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, as well as in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Many of his poems have been turned into songs, including by recording artists Sheryl Crow, David Broza, and Madison Smartt Bell. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation, and he has taught at Bennington and Marlboro Colleges. His first novel, Way Out West, was published in 2022. He lives in Vermont and works as a freelance editor. www.wyncooper.com
Brian Mosher resides in Mansfield, MA. His work has appeared in Blood and Bourbon, Lily Poetry Review, Literary Underground, Nixes Mate, Anomaly Poetry, eMerge, Esoterica, and others. He received Honorable Mention in the Joe Gouviea Outermost Poetry Contest, and his short story “Fragments” was a winner of the Nikki Hanna Literary Challenge. His most recent books are the collection, A Muster of Melodious Musings (2025 Metaphysical Fox Press), Double Vision, a collaboration with artist Becky Haletky (2026), and the chapbook Relict (2026 Finishing Line Press). His website is Phlubbermatic: (www.phlubbermatic.blogspot.com).
Jhonny Victor graduated from the State University of Haiti‘s School of Law in Port-au-Prince. He studied networking management at Devry College of New York and has been working as cable technician and electrician for more than a decade in New York City. He has published two collections of poems: The Working-Class and Its Burden, written and published while on a five-year strike as a union member, and Woman, The Thrill of Survival. In addition to being a poet, Jhonny is a songwriter, singer, guitarist, essayist and public speaker. All of his creative work emphasizes fairness, equality for all, self-awareness and humanity.

Longfellow Summer Arts Festival: Regie Gibson & Lloyd Schwartz
2026-07-26 15:00 - 16:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Join us for an afternoon with Regie Gibson, Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate, and Lloyd Schwartz, the 2026 recipient of the NEPC Sam Cornish Award.
This reading is part of the second and culminating summer of We (too) The People project, an NEPC collaboration with the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters.
The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.
In case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors.
Regie Gibson is Massachusetts’s first Poet Laureate, appointed in 2025. He is an accomplished poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator who currently serves as the Co-Artistic Director of Pedagogy at the Arts for Social Change. He is also an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on performance and spoken word poetry, and an Instructor at Clark University in Worcester, where he teaches the introduction to poetry. His poems for public occasions engage complex historical and social issues, inviting audiences into the dialogue with hope and often humor. He is intentional about using poetry to create common ground and foster social cohesion.
Regie is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, was selected one of Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. He has co-judge the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition with Marc Smith and Mark Strand, has been regularly featured on N. P. R. and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.
Regie has toured with the Chicago Mask Ensemble, performing dramatic and poetic adaptations of common myths from around the world. He founded the LiteraryMusic Ensemble Neon JuJu: a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing classic, contemporary and original literary text combined with Middle Eastern, Contemporary American and European classic music.
Regie is widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals such as The Iowa Review, Harvard Divinity Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Spoken Word Revolution (Source Books), The Good Men Project and several others. His full-length book of poetry Storms Beneath The Skin (EM Press) was published in 2001 and received the Golden Pen Award. In 2005 Regie was a featured on the PBS Arts magazine- Art Close-Up and was subsequently nominated for a Boston Grammy. Regie has received his MFA in Poetry from New England College, and continues to facilitate creative writing workshops, performances, and otherwise augmenting literary curricula for high schools and colleges across the United States.
Lloyd Schwartz (Sam Cornish Award winner) is a poet and scholar. In his poems, Schwartz often uses a conversational frame to explore intimate and familial relationships. His collections of poetry include Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948) and other poems (Arrowsmith Press 2026), Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (2021), Little Kisses (2017), Cairo Traffic (2000), Goodnight, Gracie (1992), and These People (1981). His poetry has also been featured in the anthologies Best American Poetry (1991, 1994, 2019), The Best of the Best American Poetry (2013), and Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (2009). Schwartz is the editor of Prose: Elizabeth Bishop (2011) and coeditor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (1983) and of the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008).
Schwartz also served as the classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix. Three-time winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor Awards, he has received a Professional Music Fraternity’s Radio and Television Award as well as support from the Amphion Foundation. Music In—and On—the Air (2013) offers a selection of his classical music criticism for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air.
Schwartz’s poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize. Additional honors include a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Somerville Arts Council, an Associates of the Boston Public Library Literary Lights Award, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. Schwartz has served on the executive board of PEN New England and is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he has served as director of the creative writing program. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is the Poet Laureate of the City of Somerville.

Longfellow Summer Arts Festival: Major Jackson & Kirun Kapur
2026-08-02 15:00 - 16:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Join us for an afternoon with poets Major Jackson and Kirun Kapur! This reading is part of the second and culminating summer of We (too) The People project, an NEPC collaboration with the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Blue Flower Arts, 2023), The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), Roll Deep (W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), Holding Company (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), Hoops (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. Jackson’s edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Renga for Obama (Harvard Review Monographs, 2017), and the Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems (2013). He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli (University of Michigan Press, 2022).
A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson was awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award and received honors from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion magazine, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, Poetry London, and ZYZZYVA.
Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He hosts The Slowdown podcast, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media, and is poetry editor of the Harvard Review.
Kirun Kapur‘s first collection, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, was awarded the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award and was a finalist for the Mass Book Prize. Her newest book, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Kapur was awarded the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize, and the Glenna Luschei Award, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell Colony. She serves as the editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, and teaches at Amherst College, where she is the director of the Creative Writing Program.
The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.
In case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors.

NEPC @ Chesterwood, with Tim Mayo and Pamela Wax
2026-08-05 17:30 - 18:30 | Chesterwood, 4 Williamsville Road, Stockbridge, MA, 01262, United States
The New England Poetry Club is delighted to join forces with Chesterwood, the former summer home and studio of Daniel Chester French, for “We (too) the People: Voices from the New England Poetry Club.” This is the second of two NEPC events included in the 2026 ArtsAlive! series, held in Daniel Chester French’s studio. This month’s reading features NEPC members Tim Mayo and Pamela Wax.
Admission (including refreshments): $10, National Trust for Historic Preservation members / $15 non-members.
Tim Mayo is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections, The Kingdom of Possibilities (2009), and Thesaurus of Separation (2016) and two chapbooks, The Loneliness of Dogs (2008) and Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (2019). He holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from Bennington College. A ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a two-time finalist for the Paumanok Award, Mayo is also the recipient of three Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, as well as being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Montaigne Medal. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he has worked for fifteen years at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, as both a teacher and a mental health worker, and where he is also a founding member and organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
Pamela Wax is the author of the poetry collections Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022), Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and Every Single Beast of My Heart (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems, appearing in over 60 publications, have received several awards and three Best of the Net nominations. In addition to being a poet, Pam is also an ordained rabbi and a sought-after teacher. After working as a congregational rabbi, a hospital chaplain, as assistant director for adult education for the Reform movement nationally, and for 19 years as staff rabbi at a social service agency, she currently serves as director of adult education and programming at a synagogue in Pittsfield. She lives in North Adams with her husband, her resident groundhog, and the garden that no longer is.
Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) was the famed sculptor of the Minute Man for Concord, MA, and the seated Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Chesterwood is located in idyllic Stockbridge, MA, with multiple buildings set within 122 acres. The site includes French’s Studio, the recently restored Colonial Revival Residence, and the gardens and woodland walks that he designed.
The Residence retains original antiques and decorative objects. French’s works are featured prominently throughout the property alongside paintings and sculptures by other prominent artists. For more information about a trip to Chesterwood, visit https://www.chesterwood.org/.

Longfellow Summer Arts Festival: Golden Rose Award with Marie Howe
2026-08-09 15:00 - 16:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
The New England Poetry Club is proud to award the 2026 Golden Rose Award, one of America’s oldest literary prizes, to Marie Howe. This award has honored over a century’s worth of American poets whose work has deepened the imaginative life of our nation. This event concludes the second and culminating summer of We (too) The People, an NEPC collaboration with the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters.
Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems, (W.W. Norton 2024), which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State. She is the poet-in-residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Marie Howe’s The Good Thief (1988) was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” In that collection, Howe’s oracular yet self-doubting speakers often voice their concerns through Biblical and mythical allusions. Kunitz, on selecting the book for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, observed, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”
Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU. She coedited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She is the poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Howe lives in New York City.
The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.
In case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors.

Poetry at Magazine Beach Park: Peter Payack, Michael Todd Steffen, Jessica Lucci
2026-08-16 16:00 - 18:00 | Magazine Beach Park Nature Center, 668 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The NEPC is delighted to return, for a third summer, to Mass Audubon’s Magazine Beach Park Nature Center in Cambridge. This event, the first of two, is free of charge and the venue is accessible. Registration is requested. An open mic will follow the featured poets. Please join us!
Peter Payack was the first Poet Populist of Cambridge, Massachusetts (2007-2009). His innovation, Phone-a-Poem, the Cambridge/Boston Poetry Hotline (1976-2001), along with his work and realia, is archived at Harvard’s Lamont Library.
Payack’s poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Cornell Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, etc. He has published over 1,500 poems, stories, prose poems, and photos. His poem, “The Migration of Darkness”, won the 1980 Rhysling Award. Quirk Books named it the number one poem that unites science and art. His work has been extensively anthologized, including Knowing & Writing, New Perspectives on Classical Questions (Harper Collins), The Paris Review Anthology (Norton), Asimov’s Wonders of the World (Dial), and Envisioning Other Worlds (Cornelsen, Berlin).
Payack is the inventor of The Stonehenge Watch™, a replica of Stonehenge inside an old-fashioned pocket watch case, which can be used as a shadow clock to tell time, mark the seasons, and predict eclipses. The Stonehenge Watch™ premiered at The First International Sky Art Conference at MIT.
As a Sky Artist, Payack has been commissioned to do STAR-POEMS! for The New York Avant Garde Festival, The International Sky Art Conference (Cambridge, MA, Delphi, Greece), The Harvard 350 Celebration, and Boston’s First Night.
Payack was awarded the 2010 Haskall Award for Distinguished Teaching at The University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Michael Todd Steffen lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He helps coordinate The Hastings Room Reading Series, and frequently publishes articles about new and established poets on the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene website. His poems have appeared in journals, including The Boston Globe, The Dark Horse, Everse Radio, The Exacting Clam, North of Oxford, Ibbetson Street and spoKe. Boris Dralyuk (managing editor for Nimrod Journal) writes, “I have read [Steffen’s] poems with enormous satisfaction. His lines are supple and wear their unmistakable wisdom lightly.” Calling his second book, On Earth As It Is, “important work,” Joan Houlihan noted Steffen’s “intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.” Mike’s third collection, I Saw My Life, is just out from Lily Poetry Review Books.
Jessica Lucci is a poet and steampunk author who writes about modern issues while maintaining historic integrity. You can find her poetry collections, How Can I Steal a Purse and Graveyard Shift, at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. Her literacy program, “Watch City Readers,” has been awarded grants for five years in a row from the Mass Cultural Council and Waltham Cultural Council. She loves little adventures, as long as she has a notebook.

Poetry at the Manse: Jean L. Kreiling, Liane St. Laurent, Merryn Rutledge
2026-08-23 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
The NEPC’s 2026 season at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., continues on Sunday, August 23. This free reading will be held under a tent outdoors, at an accessible venue.
Make a day of it! Arrive early or linger after the reading to explore the orchard, stroll along the Concord River, or enjoy a picnic on the grounds. You can also deepen your visit by joining a guided tour of the historic house before or after the event.
Learn more and pre-register for a tour: https://thetrustees.org/place/the-old-manse/.
Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Home and Away; her fifth will be published later this year. Her work has been awarded the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, and three New England Poetry Club prizes, among other honors. A Professor Emeritus of Music at Bridgewater State University, she has published articles on the intersections between music and literature in numerous academic journals. She currently serves as an Associate Poetry Editor for Able Muse Review, and she lives on the coast of Massachusetts.
Liane St. Laurent has worn many hats: horse-drawn carriage driver, apple picker, English teacher, She is now a retired IT professional. Her poetry appears in The Banyan Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Roi Fainéant Press, Yellow Arrow Journal, Touchstone, Soundings East, and Smoky Quartz, among others. Her debut chapbook is un/winter (Bee Monk Press, 2025.) Liane lives in NH with her husband, two dogs, and an array of woodland creatures.
Winner of Orison Books’ 2023 Best Spiritual Literature poem prize and a Naugatuck River Review 2024 Best Narrative Poem finalist, Merryn Rutledge is the author of the collections Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed and To Carve a Path Through Thickets (Kelsay Books). She also teaches poetry craft, reviews new poetry books, sings, and dances.

Poetry at Magazine Beach Park: Thomas DeFreitas, Miriam Manglani, Joyce Wilson
2026-09-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Magazine Beach Park Nature Center, 668 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The NEPC returns to Mass Audubon’s Magazine Beach Park Nature Center in Cambridge for the second of two poetry readings this summer. This event is free of charge, and the venue is accessible. Registration is requested. An open mic will follow the featured poets. Please join us!
Thomas DeFreitas was born in Boston. Educated at the Boston Latin School, he attended the University of Massachusetts (in Boston and in Amherst) for four lackluster semesters. His poems have appeared in Dappled Things, Ibbetson Street, LIGHT, Pensive, and elsewhere. Thomas has published two full-length collections and three chapbooks with Kelsay Books, his most recent title being Elegies & Devotions (2025). His forthcoming book, Stars Bestow Their Quadrillionary Blessing, will be published this autumn. In 2019, Thomas’s sonnet “Detox” was chosen as an Award Poem by the editors of Plainsongs. In 2024, his poem “Grief” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editor of Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY.
Resident of Arlington, MA, Thomas is active in the New England Poetry Club, Boston’s Black Seed Writers, Arlington’s Beehive Group, and a top-secret quartet of clandestine bards called the Honeycomb, who are currently plotting to take over the explorable universe and saturate it with lyricism and benevolence.
Miriam Manglani lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and three children. She holds a Master’s degree in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA in English from Brandeis University. She is the author of the poetry collection Invisible Lines (Kelsay Books) and the chapbook Ordinary Wonders (Prolific Press). Her work has appeared in Sparks of Calliope, One Art, Glimpse, Canyon Voices, Ibbetson Street, Paterson Literary Review, and other journals. When she is not writing, she enjoys spending time with her friends and family, reading, biking, swimming, and crocheting. Explore her published work at www.miriammanglani.com.
Joyce Wilson is editor of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet since 1997. She has taught English at Boston University and Suffolk University, about ten years each. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them Alabama Literary Review, Classical Outlook, and The Hudson Review. She has published four books of poetry: The Etymology of Spruce, The Springhouse 3, The Need for a Bridge, and Take and Receive. Her most recent poetry collection is The Morning after Burns Night, appearing in summer 2026.

Poetry at the Manse: Trapper Markelz, Doug Holder, Alix Klingenberg
2026-09-27 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
The NEPC’s 2026 season at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., concludes on Sunday, September 27. This free reading will be held under a tent outdoors, at an accessible venue.
Make a day of it! Arrive early or linger after the reading to explore the orchard, stroll along the Concord River, or enjoy a picnic on the grounds. You can also deepen your visit by joining a guided tour of the historic house before or after the event.
Learn more and pre-register for a tour: https://thetrustees.org/place/the-old-manse/.
Trapper Markelz (he/him) writes from Arlington, Massachusetts. He is the author of the chapbooks Childproof Sky (Cherry Dress 2023) and Off To War, Daughter (Rockwood Press, 2026). His work has appeared in the journals Baltimore Review, Passengers Journal, Pine Row Press, Wild Roof Journal, The Dewdrop, and Poetry Online, among others. He is also a Board Advisory and Member News Editor of the New England Poetry Club. Learn more at trappermarkelz.com
Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. Formerly the co-president of the NEPC with Denise Provost, he now is on the Board of Directors. The “Doug Holder papers collection” resides at the University of Buffalo Libraries. For many years Holder has taught creative writing and college writing at Bunker Hill Community College and Endicott College. For 23 years he was the director of the Newton Free Library Poetry Series. He has been the arts/editor for The Somerville Times for the past 24 years, and many of his taped and video interviews with poets and writers are archived at U/Mass Boston, Harvard University, and elsewhere. His own work has been published in Rattle, the Worcester Review, Lowell Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Toronto Quarterly, the Boston Globe, The Cafe Review, and many others. He now resides in Revere, Mass., with his cat Klezmer.
Alix Klingenberg is a poet and essayist whose work explores animism, desire, theological complexity, and creativity as a spiritual practice. She is the author of four poetry collections: Secrets & Stars, Bread Sex Trees, Hermit Season, and Quietly Wild (Mandala Earth Publishing, 2025), a gathering of poems, photographs, and rituals attuned to the turning year.
Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and she serves as Managing Poetry Editor at Phil Lit Journal. Alix studied visual art at Oberlin College before earning a Master of Divinity from Meadville Lombard Theological School. She teaches workshops and leads creative retreats through Earth & Verse, her Substack publication. She lives in Melrose with her family and a small, opinionated band of animals.

NEPC @ The Menino: Mark Pawlak, Mid Walsh, Susan Eisenberg
2026-10-04 14:00 - 16:00 | Menino Arts Center, 26 Central Avenue, Hyde Park, MA, 02136, United States
On October 4, please join the New England Poetry Club in a 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.
Poet, visual artist, and oral historian Susan Eisenberg was among the first women to be become a licensed union construction electrician. Her sixth poetry collection, Fault Line (Broadstone, 2026) explores how the political and moral landscape, friendships, and language itself have been altered by the catastrophic destruction in Palestine. Previous books include the nonfiction NYT Notable Book We’ll Call You If We Need You, and the poetry books Stanley’s Girl, Perpetual Care, Blind Spot, Pioneering, and It’s a Good Thing I’m Not Macho. Her touring mixed media art installation, On Equal Terms, exhibited at the AFL-CIO in Washington DC. Honors include the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, the Joe Hill Award, and the University of Michigan’s Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist fellowship. A Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, she is Poetry Editor of Labor: Studies in Working Class History (Duke).
Mark Pawlak is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Special Operation (Beltway Editions, 2026), Away Away (Arrowsmith Press, 2024), and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). His poems have been translated into Chinese, German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. His work has appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. He taught mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston (1979-2016), where he and received the Chancellors Achievement Award. Since 1980, he has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary press Hanging Loose. He lives in Cambridge.
Mid Walsh is a poet, singer, athlete, husband, and grandfather living near the ocean. His new collection, Composting: Reflections on Tools, Trees, and Time, was published by Kelsay Books in 2026. A graduate of Yale University with a degree in English and an MBA, he has worked as a carpenter, high-tech executive, and yoga studio owner. His poetry transforms the details of suburban life — household chores, time on the water, the care of family and place — into the music of language.
Mid began writing poetry in high school, encouraged by an English teacher with whom he still corresponds — now over a century old. After years devoted to raising his family, he returned to writing at fifty and has met weekly with the same poetry workshop for more than twenty years. His poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Nixes Mate, The Road Not Taken, Blue Unicorn, Silkworm, and other journals. For him, writing, personal growth, and daily life are inseparable — a practice of discipline, delight, and renewal.
