Poetry at Magazine Beach Park: Peter Payack, Michael Todd Steffen, Jessica Lucci
2026-08-16 16:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | 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.
