New England Poetry Club

Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary. Scholars Carl Rollyson and Melissa Bradshaw discuss the life and work of Amy Lowell.
2024-03-24 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Welcome! You are invited to join a Zoom meeting Amy Lowell scholars Melissa Bradshaw and Carl Rollyson. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
An award-winning Amy Lowell scholar, Dr. Melissa Bradshaw is editing both print and digital editions of the poet’s never-before collected letters. Professor Bradshaw suggests that she will provide some interesting—sometimes conflict-ridden—details of events in the early years of the New England Poetry Club when Lowell was its first president.
Professor Carl Rollyson is the author of the recently published biography, Amy Lowell Anew. His book presents details of Lowell’s unconventional life and critical reassessment of Lowell’s work and legacy.
Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, at Baruch College, CUNY, has published fourteen biographies, including Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography and Amy Lowell Among Her Contemporaries. In 2020, he published a two volume-biography, The Life of William Faulkner, and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. Podcast: A Life in Biography: https://anchor.fm/carl-rollyson; website: carlrollyson.com.
Just published: Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1. Volume 2 is forthcoming in August 2024. Also forthcoming: The Making of Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism, and Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.
Melissa Bradshaw teaches writing, pedagogy, and literary and cultural studies at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on the cultural rhetorics that inform our understanding of powerful public women. She has published extensively on Amy Lowell, co-editing a volume of her poems as well as a volume of scholarly essays about her. Her book, Amy Lowell, Diva Poet won the 2011 MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars. She has also published on poets Edith Sitwell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Denise Levertov, and on divas more generally. She is currently working on The Selected Letters of Amy Lowell, and directs the Amy Lowell Letters Project, a critical digital edition of Lowell’s collected letters, for which she was awarded an NEH-Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Digital Publication. Read more about the letters project at melissabradshaw.org/amy-lowell-letters-project/

Fruitlands: Maru Colbert, Gary Duehr, A.M. Juster
2024-03-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Rd, Harvard, MA, 01451
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”.
Gary Duehr has taught writing for local universities including BU, Lesley University and Tufts. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His books of poetry include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency Press), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press,). His children’s book in verse is Felicia the Ferret and the Atom Smasher from Thurston Howl Publications.
A.M. Juster is the poetry editor for Plough. His poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. He is the only three-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and has won the Barnstone Translation Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, and four different prizes of the New England Poetry Club. His eleven books include Horace’s Satires (U Penn Press 2008,) Tibullus’ Elegies (Oxford U Press 2012), Aldhelm’s Riddles (U Toronto Press 2016) and Wonder and Wrath (Paul Dry Books 2020). Paul Dry Books will publish his first children’s book, Girlatee, and W.W. Norton will publish his translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.
The reading will be held in the Fruitlands Museum Wayside Visitor Center. Parking is available next to the building and the Visitor Center is wheelchair accessible.

Readings are free with admission to the Museum’s Art Gallery, Gift Shop and Visitor’s Center: $5 for nonmember adults, seniors, students, and children ages 5-13. There is no charge for Trustees Members or children under age 5.

Registration suggested

Four Poets at the Waltham Historical Society
2024-03-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Waltham Historical Society, 260 Grove St., Waltham, MA, 02453, United States
Prepare for a unique tapestry of history and verse! The Waltham Historical Society and the New England Poetry Club join forces on March 12th, 7:00 PM, to explore Waltham’s rich spirit, and more, through the voices of:

Barbara de la Cuesta, poet and novelist, weaving Waltham tales that transcend time.
Owen Lewis, Professor of Psychiatry and Narrative Medicine, bridging the gap between personal home and Berkshires history.
Jessica Lucci, local author and poet, capturing the essence of Waltham in lyrical strokes.
Gail Thomas, poet, painting vivid Swift River Valley portraits with words.

This captivating evening promises to be a journey through the past, present, and possibilities of diverse Massachusetts locales. Free and open to the public.
Barbara de la Cuesta taught and worked as a journalist in South America, and is now a teacher of English as a Second Language and Spanish. Out of this experience came her two prize winning novels, The Spanish Teacher, winner of the Gival Press Award in 2007, and Rosa, winner of the Driftless Novella Prize from Brain Mill Press in 2017. She has also published two collections of poetry with Finishing Line Press, as well as two novels, The Mists, and Henrietta Rose. Her collection of short stories, The Place Where Judas Lost his Boots, has recently won The Brighthorse Prize for short fiction.
Adam’s Chair is a peek into the City of Waltham, past, present—the future perhaps represented by the shuttle Columbia orbiting above on the day of April 11, 1981, when the book opens with an old French Canadian, Alcide Arsenault, retired from the Mill, entering Mt. Feake Cemetery, whose neighborhoods reflect the city’s own, just before dawn. Priscilla, descendant of the city’s founders, college drop-out, Socialist since thirteen, now home health aide, sets out on her rounds on her bicycle. Thus the day begins: A harpsichord arrives at city hall. A parachutist lands in Leary field. Participants in the daycenter are oriented to reality and the mayor visits to celebrate Adie Blakey’s hundredth birthday, the shuttle sends down messages …
Owen Lewis is the author of three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, most recently Knock-knock. Field Light, was a Distinguished Favorite, 2020 NYCBigBook Award and a 2021 “Must Read”, Mass Book Awards. best man was the recipient of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Recent prizes include the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize and the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry/Arts & Letters. He is also recipient of the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine.
The epicenter of Field Light is the back porch of “The Dormouse,” 1922, home of Peggy Cresson, daughter of Daniel Chester French. In a photo she sits with her husband and the granddaughter-in-law of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a neighbor. The author, in 2018, sits on the same porch of the same house, his home for nearly thirty years, pondering that photo. He begins to question how one can know history, discovering personal connections to the history surrounding him. The book weaves a personal telling of Berkshire history, spanning the years when the land was “owned” by Munsie, to the trial in 1782 in Great Barrington that freed enslaved people of Massachusetts, to the years of the socially elite and beyond. In this historical collage, the writers, artists, musicians, and even some physicians, of the Berkshires speak.
Jessica Lucci is a poet, steampunk, and historical fiction author who writes about modern issues while maintaining historic integrity. She makes her home in Waltham, Mass., where she serves as president of the Waltham Arts Council, and on the board of directors of the Waltham Museum and High Tech Waltham. She also helps organize faires and festivals in Waltham, such as Waltham Pride, and Kaleidoscope. She was the featured artist for her poetry at Watch City Arts, May, 2023.
Her haiku were included in an installation commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Minuteman Bikeway. More haiku have been installed in store windows in Arlington and Lexington. Her poetry was included in the “Moody Street Art Walk” in 2023. Her works include the steampunk novellas Waltham Watch and Salem Switch, the soon-to-be published historical fiction novella Triangle House, and the poetry collections How Can I Steal a Purse and Graveyard Shift.
Gail Thomas’ books are Trail of Roots, Leaving Paradise, Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies including CALYX, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, Cumberland River Review, and Mezzo Cammin. Among her awards are the Seven Kitchens Press award for Trail of Roots, the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, the Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read” for Waving Back. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and Ucross, and several poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches poetry with Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshops, visits schools and libraries with her therapy dog Sunny, and works with immigrant and refugee communities in Western Massachusetts.
No Simple Wilderness: An Elegy for Swift River Valley is about the four towns and seven villages that were drowned and the 3,500 people who were displaced to build the Quabbin Reservoir. Thomas interviewed elders who grew up in the Valley, and their voices are represented throughout the book which has been used as a text in college courses. From the book’s forward: “Sometimes a work of poetry is an act of reclamation as it is in No Simple Wilderness. With these poems, Thomas attains a seamlessness not only between past and present but between personal and public, a seamlessness that is succinct, powerful, and entirely essential.” – Jane Brox

Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary: A Tribute to Amy Lowell at All She Wrote Books
2024-03-07 19:00 - 20:30 | All She Wrote Books, 75 Washington St,, Somerville, MA, 02143, United States
On Thursday, March 7, at 7 pm, poets CD Collins, Melissa Nilles, and D Donna will read and talk about Amy Lowell’s poetry, influence, and legacy in the casual and welcoming atmosphere of All She Wrote Books, an intersectional feminist and queer bookstore in East Somerville. The bookstore is accessible to those who need disability accommodations.
Please register for the event at the Eventbrite link below:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/amy-lowell-150th-anniversary-a-tribute-to-amy-lowell-all-she-wrote-books-tickets-835993407787?utm_experiment=test_share_listing&aff=ebdsshios

Getting There: 3 min walk from the East Somerville Green Line T stop, 14 min walk from the Sullivan Square Orange line T stop.

Kentucky native CD Collins follows the storytelling traditions of the South, both as a solo artist and when accompanied by musicians. Collins was named the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Malden, Massachusetts and has been selected as a Red-Letter Poet by Steven Ratiner. Collins is the author of Blue Land, a collection of short stories (First Trade Edition, Polyho Press); a poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Severed Head (Ibbetson Street Press); and the novel Afterheat (Empty City Press). She has appeared at Berklee College of Music, the Boston Public Library, Boston’s ICA, the New York Public Library, and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
Melissa Nilles is a musician, composer, writer, poet, expressive arts therapist, and licensed mental health counselor living in Somerville, MA with her partner and the extraordinary Siberian cat Prince Siddhartha. Nilles is the owner of a small private psychotherapy and expressive arts therapy practice in Somerville serving creative people going through life/career transitions, LGBTQ+ individuals, or people with ADHD, anxiety, or trauma. She is the frontwoman (lead vocalist, lyricist, and keyboardist) of Boston-based band Ruby Grove (2022- now), which is a New England Music Award-nominated multi-genre indie alternative musical project inspired by trip-hop, soul, indietronica, and indie rock.
D Donna (they/any) has spent the last five years basking in the warm light of Boston’s queer, trans, and poet communities. They have not, in all that time, figured out how to write an introductory bio. But they love reading poems, and they love all of you, and that’ll be enough for now.

Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary; The Public Library of Brookline; Multilingual Reading of her poems
2024-02-26 18:00 - 19:30 | The Public Library of Brookline, 361 Washington Street,, Brookline, MA, 02445, United States
Join us to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Brookline poet Amy Lowell
The New England Poetry Club, The Public Library of Brookline, along with the Brookline Commission for the Arts, will celebrate Amy Lowell’s life and work with an introduction to her poetry and readings of her poems in the original English, as well as translations into other languages.

Program:
Video Introduction
Introduction to Amy Lowell
Multilingual Reading
Reception.
The program will feature poets from Brookline and the Greater Boston area, including current Brookline poet laureate Jennifer Barber and previous Brookline poets laureate. Mary Buchinger of the New England Poetry Club will present Amy Lowell.
A full list of presenters will be available soon.
https://nepoetryclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mov-amy-17.mp4

Fruitlands: Chard deNiord, Robbie Gamble, Pamela Gemme
2024-02-18 14:00 - 15:00 | Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Rd, Harvard, MA, 01451
(Left to right: Pamela Gemme, Chard deNiord, Robbie Gamble)
Chard deNiord is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020), Interstate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets: Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century Poetry (Marick Press, 2011) and I Would Lie To You If I Could (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). deNiord is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Providence College. From 2015 to 2019 he served as poet laureate of Vermont. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.
Robbie Gamble (he/him) received an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. His poems and essays have appeared in Post Road, Pangyrus, Salamander, The Sun, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Worcester Review. His chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans, published by Lily Poetry Review Press, was a finalist for the 2022 Jean Pedrick Award. His essay “Exit Wound” was cited as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2020. Robbie is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
Pamela Gemme was born to working class parents and grew up in Gardner, Massachusetts. She went to state universities, is a poet, artist, political activist, and a child protection social work consultant for Massachusetts’s DCF. Recent or forthcoming publications include The American Journal of Poetry, Pangyrus, Haiku Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Heliotrope Anthology, J Journal, SoFloPoJo, Ibbetson Street Magazine, and many others. Pamela was a Reader for Lily Poetry Review 2019, Art Editor Lily Poetry Review 2018-2019, and won Two Poetry-In-Place Awards for the city of Newton, Massachusetts. Her poem “Working the Child at Risk Hotline” received an Honorable Mention in the Common Ground Review Spring 2021. She was on the poet’s committee for the first National Baseball Poetry Festival, and co-edited Essential Voices: A Covid-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023).
The reading will be held in the Fruitlands Museum Wayside Visitor Center. Parking is available next to the building and the Visitor Center is wheelchair accessible.

Readings are free with admission to the Museum’s Art Gallery, Gift Shop and Visitor’s Center: $5 for nonmember adults, seniors, students, and children ages 5-13. There is no charge for Trustees Members or children under age 5.

Registration suggested

Visit New England Poetry Club at Radio Show, "Open Reading" hosted by Sal Inglima
2024-02-10 14:00 | MA
New England Poetry Club Board Members will visit the at Somerville Media Center, Radio Show, “Open Reading” hosted by Sal Inglima.
Conversation about Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary, her life, events and reading poems by Denise Provost, Linda Conte, Doug Holder and Nidia Hernández.
Sal Inglima’s Open Reading brings the poets of Somerville and beyond to Boston Free Radio.

Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary; Wreath-laying at her grave at Mt. Auburn Cemetery.
2024-02-09 13:00 - 14:30 | Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mt Auburn St,, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The first of this year’s Amy Lowell events will be a wreath-laying at her grave at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge in collaboration with Friends Mount Auburn Cemetery.
It will take place on her birthday, Friday, February 9th, at 1 pm.
If you are so inclined, please bring a Lowell poem to read as part of this event.
We’ll have other events, including readings and discussions, to celebrate Lowell’s literary – and lyrical – legacies.

https://nepoetryclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mov-amy-17.mp4

Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary. Networks taken by Amy Lowell Poems.
2024-02-09 | Social networks, Instagram, FaceBook, X, Linkedin
https://nepoetryclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mov-amy-17.mp4

This February 9, marks 150 years since Amy Lowell’s birth, throughout the day we will be offering readings of her poems in the voices of important poets, both her American peers and her peers from around the world. We will extend these readings throughout the year 2024 to celebrate its 150th Anniversary.
We are going to take over the networks with videos of poets reading Amy Lowell.
Amy Lowell in the voices of all the poets on networks.
Everyone read Amy Lowell on the networks.
Hashtag: #amylowell150.

Fruitlands: Mary Buchinger, Timothy Gager, John L. Holgerson
2024-01-21 14:00 - 15:00 | Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Rd, Harvard, MA, 01451
(Left to right: Timothy Gager, Mary Buchinger, John L. Holgerson)
Mary Buchinger is the author of six collections of poetry; her most recent books are Navigating the Reach and Virology; her work has appeared in AGNI, Maine Review, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. Buchinger grew up on a farm in Michigan, volunteered for the Peace Corps, and earned a doctorate in linguistics from Boston University. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club.
Bestselling author Timothy Gager has published 18 books of fiction and poetry, which includes his latest novel, Joe the Salamander. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over one thousand works of fiction and poetry published, eighteen nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated twice for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio. In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, The Best of Timothy Gager, with 150 pages of new material. Timothy served as the Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review for ten years, and was the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.
John L. Holgerson is the author of three books of poetry: Convictions of the Heart (In Case of Emergency Press 2021), Unnecessary Tattoo and Other Stains on a Stainless Steel Heart (Finishing Line Press 2016) and Broken Borders (Wasteland Press 2012). He has published poems in small literary journals, in print and online. He is listed in the Poets & Writers’ Magazine Directory of Poets and Writers, is one of three MassPoetry representatives for Bristol County and co-hosts For the Love of Words, an hour long program on Easton Cable Access Television featuring a different poet and musician each month. He lives most of the year in Taunton, MA and is the founder of the Poetry as Verdict project providing a public venue for high school student-poets to read their work. Since 1995, he resides the rest of each year on the Greek island of Hydra. Please see johnlholgerson.com.
The reading will be held in the Fruitlands Museum Wayside Visitor Center. Parking is available next to the building and the Visitor Center is wheelchair accessible.

Readings are free with admission to the Museum’s Art Gallery, Gift Shop and Visitor’s Center: $5 for nonmember adults, seniors, students, and children ages 5-13. There is no charge for Trustees Members or children under age 5.

Registration suggested

Amy Lowell 150th Anniversary; Wreath-laying at her grave at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
2024-01-13 00:00 | MA
The first of this year’s Amy Lowell events will be a wreath-laying at her grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, in Collaboration with Friends Mount Auburn Cemetery.
It will take place on her birthday, Friday, February 9th, at 3:30 pm.
If you are so inclined, please bring a Lowell poem to read as part of this event.
We’ll have other events, including readings and discussions, to celebrate Lowell’s literary – and lyrical – legacies.

Member Celebration Online
2024-01-07 15:00 - 17:00 | Online
Our first Member Celebration in March 2023 was a joyful event, featuring a wide variety of voices. Please join us for the second Celebration!
To attend, register in advance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZckcuytrT0iGNfUyhtRETnjxahnxr4nFbv7. You will receive an individual Zoom link.

Fruitlands. Jhonny Victor, Marie Gauthier, Len Krisak
2023-12-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Rd, Harvard, MA, 01451
Marie Gauthier is the author of Leave No Wake (Pine Row Press, 2022) and Hunger All Inside (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Sugar House Review, The West Review, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She works for Pioneer Valley Books, runs the Collected Poets Series in Shelburne Falls, Mass., where she lives with her family, and serves as Co-President of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.
Len Krisak’s most recent books are Say What You Will (original verse) and a complete verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. His work has appeared in the Hudson, Sewanee, Antioch, and Southwest Reviews, among many others, and he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost Prizes. Len is also a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
Jhonny Victor is an Haitian American Poet and Author. He uses his native language, Haitian Creole, French and English as tools to express his emotions, his understanding and his philosophy of life through poetry, lyrics, essays, guitar playing, singing and public speaking. He has published his first poetry collection, The Working-class and Its Burden, describing it as inspirational and a call for action.

Registration suggested

ZOOM: Rajiv Mohabir, Lindsey Schaffer, Cindy Veach
2023-12-10 15:00 - 16:30 | MA
L to R: Lindsey Schaffer, Rajiv Mohabir, Cindy Veach
Sunday, December 10, 3-4:30 pm
Via ZOOM: register in advance to receive the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEsduqoqTIjH91ENL3VOYcKRXTkpy2BW1zX
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
(Purchase Whale Aria)
Lindsey Schaffer is a poet interested in exploring the intersections between creative writing and museum spaces. In particular, she seeks to understand material culture in the context of the cities in which it is displayed. This focus has led her to unearth a variety of contradictions in two cities which has culminated in two chapbooks, City of Contradiction (Selcouth Station, 2022) and Witch City (dancing girl press, forthcoming).
(To purchase City of Contradiction, contact Lindsey on Twitter @LindseyAnn3)
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and an IPPY Silver Medalist in poetry, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Salamander and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.
(Purchase Gloved Against Blood; Her Kind)

Fruitlands: Ann Bookman, Mary Beth Hines, Alfred Nicol
2023-11-19 14:00 - 16:00 | Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Rd, Harvard, MA, 01451
Reading as part of New England Poetry Club’s reading series at Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Mass.
Left to right: Alfred Nicol, Mary Beth Hines, Ann Bookman
Ann Bookman, a recent Pushcart Prize nominee, has published poems in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Larcom Review, Soul-Lit: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, Chronogram, and Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, among others. In 2012, she published a chapbook, Point of Attachment, with Finishing Line Press. Her first full collection, Blood Lines, was published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2022. After a 40-year career in academia, she is currently a Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston and serves on the Board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center. For more information about her work, please visit her website: annbookman.com
Mary Beth Hines grew up in Massachusetts where she spent Saturday afternoons falling in love with stories and poems in the Waltham Public Library. A graduate of The College of the Holy Cross, she also studied for a year at Durham University in England. Following a career in public service (Volpe Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts), she began a regular creative writing practice. She is an award-winning poet, an alumna of the Colrain Manuscript Conference, and recently completed an “Assets for Artists” residency at Mass MoCA with the Boiler House Poets Collective. Kelsay Books published her debut collection, Winter at a Summer House, in November 2021. Her poetry appears in Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM, Tar River, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Visit her at www.marybethhines.com.
Alfred Nicol’s translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance, published in November 2022, has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.” Nicol was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light. His other publications include Animal Psalms and Elegy for Everyone, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, Presence and The Best American Poetry 2018. The New England Poetry Club chose Nicol for its 2006 Daniel Varoujan Award and its 2005 Firman Houghton Award.
Registration suggested / site information: https://thetrustees.org/event/88750/

Sara Backer, Miriam Levine, Rodger Martin
2023-11-11 14:00 - 15:30 | Toadstool Bookshops, 12 Emerald St., Keene, NH, 03431, United States
Co-presented with the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, at the Toadstool Bookshop, Keene. Open mic to follow.
For more information: Poetry Society of New Hampshire: https://psnh.org/events/nov11-three-nh-poets/
Toadstool: https://www.toadbooks.com/event/keene-sara-backer-miriam-levine-and-rodger-martin-all-presenting-their-poetry

Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck, follows two chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt, and Bicycle Lotus, which won the Turtle Island Chapbook Award. Her honors include a prize in the Plough Poetry Competition, ten Pushcart nominations, and fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi resident artist programs. Recent publications include Lake Effect, Slant, CutBank Online, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry Ireland. She lives in New Hampshire, works at UMass Lowell, and reads for The Maine Review.
Miriam Levine is the author of Forget about Sleep, her sixth poetry collection, winner of the 2023 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, forthcoming from New York Quarterly Books. Another collection, The Dark Opens, was chosen by Mark Doty for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Other books include: Devotion, a memoir; In Paterson, a novel. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Levine, a winner of a Pushcart Prize, is a fellow of the NEA and a grantee of the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. She lives in Florida and New Hampshire. For more information about her work, please go to miriamlevine.com.
Rodger Martin’s For All The Tea in Zhōngguó, 2019, follows The Battlefield Guide, and the selection of The Blue Moon Series by Small Press Review as a bi-monthly picks of the year. He’s received an Appalachia award for poetry, NHSCA’s award for fiction, and was a finalist for The Stanley Kunitz Medal in 2023. His work has been translated and published in China. He’s a recipient of numerous fellowships. He was co-editor of The Granite State Poetry Series and Managing Editor of The Worcester Review for twenty-seven years. His latest manuscript, The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec, is sniffing out publication.

Marcia Karp; A Poet in the House Workshop.
2023-10-29 14:00 - 15:30 | MA
An exclusive event for NEPC members: “An Order the Leaves Allow”
“You can write Click on this link to register for this event”

Marcia Karp taught literary and editorial matters at Boston University. She has poems and translations in The Times Literary Supplement; Harvard Review; Agenda; Literary Imagination; The Guardian; Ploughshares; Partisan Review; Penguin Books’ Catullus in English and Petrarch in English; Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 (Waywiser); and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (Norton) and in her collection, If by Song (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021).
Join on Zoom, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm,for this discussion of the variety of ways volumes of poems are ordered. Since a book itself is a participant in, and a witness to, the order within it, we will begin by thinking about how the material world of poems – the pages they are on and the variety of books in which they have been collected – might effect and affect their ordering.
Most of us hope that our own ordering will be discovered by attentive readers whose understanding of what we have done would then be deepened. This Poet in the House session will consider particular arrangements of poems, including those you might be working on, as well as general matters. Please come. Enthusiastic disorder is welcome.

Poet in the House with Marcia Karp
An Order the Leaves Allow
This Poet in the House gathering will be a place to talk about a variety of ways volumes of poems, including your own, might be ordered. Since a book itself is a participant in, and a witness to, the order within it, we will begin by thinking about how the material world of poems – the pages they are on and the variety of books in which they have been collected – might effect and affect their ordering.
Papyrus scrolls allowed certain orders that might have some bearing on our own digital scrolls. Books with a spine, those things beloved of centuries of readers and writers, make other things possible.
One way to look at how a volume might be ordered, is to start with pieces of papyrus or paper and work backwards. The poem we call “My Cat Jeoffry” was found somewhere in “sixteen folio pages closely written on both sides in the handwriting of Christopher Smart.” If possible, you will be sent pages that duplicate some of those and together we will try to make sense, ordered sense, of what was once considered madness, and then seen as greatness.
Some of us hope that our ordering will be discovered by attentive readers whose understanding of what we have done would then be deepened. George Herbert and Sylvia Path took great with arrangements, only to have those undone by editors. In any case, readers have their own ways of going through what they read. Anne Ferry wrote “anthologies have the advantage in containing discontinuous, short pieces suited to the desultory mode of reading that has come to be called dipping.” True, too, of volumes of a single author’s poems. What’s a poet to do?
This Poet in the House session will consider particular arrangements of poems, including those you might be working on, as well as general concerns. Please come. Enthusiastic disorder is welcome.

CANCELLED: Poetry at the Old Manse – October
2023-10-22 14:00 - 15:00 | MA
This outdoor reading is cancelled due to the weather forecast: to be rescheduled.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2023 AT 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

Join the Trustees and the New England Poetry Club outdoors in the open air tent at the Old Manse for free poetry readings on select Sunday afternoons.
Extend your visit by signing up for a tour of the historic house prior to or following the reading. Learn more about tour offerings and pre-register for house tours here: https://thetrustees.org/place/the-old-manse/. Plan to come early or stay late for a stroll around the orchard and along the banks of the Concord River or bring a picnic to enjoy on the grounds.

October Poets:
Mary Buchinger is the author of six collections of poetry; her most recent books are Navigating the Reach and Virology; her work has appeared in AGNI, Maine Review, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. Buchinger grew up on a farm in Michigan, volunteered for the Peace Corps, and earned a doctorate in linguistics from Boston University. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club.
Dr. Sara Epstein is a clinical psychologist who integrates mindfulness practices, including writing, in her psychotherapy work with children and adults. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, Amethyst Review, Chest Journal, Nixes Mate Review, Plainsongs, and museum of americana, among others. Bar of Rest is her first book of poems, published this year by Kelsay Books.
“Transparent, vulnerable and strong, Sara’s poems open the reader to a courageous journey of imagery and metaphor that gracefully land in insight, understanding and healing.”
––Lani Peterson, Psy.D, psychologist and story coach
Merryn Rutledge is a poet, reviewer, and teacher of poetry as craft. Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed (Kelsay Books, 2023) features poems about her forebears in the American South, challenges like grief, and reflections on the costs of racism. Her poems have appeared widely in journals throughout the world and in several anthologies, such as All Shall Be Well (Amythest Press, 2023), an anthology celebrating the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. Merryn’s reviews of new poetry books by women have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly and Pedestal, for example. After earning a Masters and BA with honors in English from Smith College, Merryn taught literature, writing, and film studies at Phillips Exeter Academy. In a second career, she earned a doctorate in leadership and led a national leadership development consulting firm. During that period, essays based on her field research on leadership were published in the peer-reviewed journals and in books. Merryn enjoys working for social justice causes, singing, dancing, and playing on the shore near her home south of Boston.

ZOOM. 2023 contest prize-winners
2023-10-08 15:00 - 17:00 | MA
Sunday, October 8, 3 pm (ET via ZOOM)

NEPC 2023 Prize-Winners’ Reading by the authors of the prize-winning and honorable-mention poems from our annual contests:

Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, for full-length poetry collections
Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize
Samuel Washington Allen Prize for a long poem or poem sequence
E.E. Cummings Prize, for a compelling, lyrical, or experimental short poem
Amy Lowell Prize, for an outstanding poem of any length or style by a poet with strong ties to New England
Diana Der-Hovanessian Prize, for a translation from any language

Advance registration required

Poetry at the Old Manse – September
2023-09-24 14:00 - 15:00 | MA
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2023 AT 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

Join the New England Poetry Club outdoors in the open air tent at the Old Manse for free poetry readings on select Sunday afternoons.
Extend your visit by signing up for a tour of the historic house prior to or following the reading. Learn more about tour offerings and pre-register for house tours here. Plan to come early or stay late for a stroll around the orchard and along the banks of the Concord River or bring a picnic to enjoy on the grounds.

September Poets:
Frances Donovan is the author of Arboretum in a Jar (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023). Her chapbook Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Donovan’s poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Solstice, Heavy Feather Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Her interviews of other poets can be found at The Rumpus and on her website, www.gardenofwords.com. Donovan holds an MFA in poetry from Lesley University and is a certified Poet Educator with Mass Poetry. A poem of hers has been displayed at Boston City Hall. Donovan’s work deals with themes of home, family, intergenerational trauma, and sexual and gender identity. She remembers fondly the summer of 1998, when she drove a bulldozer in a Pride parade while wearing a bustier.
Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the South Coast of Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, Orbis, Crannóg, Measure, and American Arts Quarterly, among others. She won the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition in Poetry in Galway, Ireland; the 2016 Parent-Writer Fellowship in Poetry from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing; the 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland in 2019. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.
Susan Jo Russell is a mathematics educator from Somerville, MA. Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Chautauqua, Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, EcoTheo Review, Leon, Passager, and elsewhere, and she has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem, “Tree,” won the 2018 Amy Lowell Prize from the New England Poetry Club and “Membrane,” appears in the collection, From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod and the Islands Through Poetry. She co-directs the Brookline (MA) Poetry Series.

DETAILS
Date: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2023
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
VENUE
Old Manse 269 Monument St
Concord, MA 01742 + Google Map
Phone:(978) 369-3909 View Venue Website

Nature Poetry in the Park
2023-09-03 17:00 - 18:00 | MA
Sunday, September 3, 2023. Free and open to the public. Fully accessible (with rest rooms)

Magazine Beach Park Nature Center, 668 Memorial Dr, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Three poets, Linda Haviland Conte, Wendy Drexler, and Denise Washington from the board of the New England Poetry Club look forward to sharing poems that explore our complex and intimate relationship with the natural world-nature as solace and nourishment, and nature under threat from habitat loss and climate change. In the spirit of eco-poetry, these are poems that comfort, but also that urge and awaken, taking as their premise that the human and natural worlds are interdependent. After the poets share their poems, there will be time for comments and questions.
Linda Haviland Conte is the author of the full-length collection Seldom Purely and the chapbook Slow as a Poem (Ibbetson Street Press). Her work has appeared in the anthologies From the Farther Shore, Constellations, Bagels with the Bards, and Connecticut River Review. Linda has been featured in Verse Daily and WCAI’s Poetry Sunday. Her poems have received recognition from state and national poetry societies. Linda serves on the board of The New England Poetry Club. (lindaconte.net). Linda lives in Somerville, MA.
Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Wendy lives in Belmont, MA.
Denise Washington is so excited to be using the power of poetry to positively bring people together one poem at a time! She is Founder, CEO and Curator of her #Pop-Up Poetry Series, A Denise Plays Hard Event Featuring Akili Jamal Haynes, Becoming Chibuzo, #Pop-Up Poetry’s Multi-disciplinary Artist! She was born and raised in Roxbury, Mass., is an Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Alum, a voice student of the late John Andrew Ross, a mentee of the late Ed Bullins, and a New England Poetry Club Advisory Board member.

Poetry at the Old Manse – August 2023
2023-08-27 02:00 - 15:00 | MA
SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2023 AT 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

Join the New England Poetry Club outdoors in the open air tent at the Old Manse for free poetry readings on select Sunday afternoons.
Sponsoring poetry in New England since 1915, the New England Poetry Club presents readings by poets with ties to the New England states and annual poetry contests. Members of the NEPC benefit from being part of a community of poets, gathering for readings by members with new books, and participating in monthly writing workshops.
Extend your visit by signing up for a tour of the historic house prior to or following the reading. Learn more about tour offerings and pre-register for house tours here. Plan to come early or stay late for a stroll around the orchard and along the banks of the Concord River or bring a picnic to enjoy on the grounds.

August Poets:

Cynthia Bargar is Associate Poetry editor at Pangyrus. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Nixes Mate, SWWIM Every Day, Driftwood Press, Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, LUMINA and in the book, Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021). Her poetry collection, Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room, came out from Lily Poetry Review Books in January, 2022. Cynthia lives with her partner, cartoonist Nick Thorkelson, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Tom Laughlin is a professor and Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Middlesex Community College. He was a founding editor of Vortext, a literary journal of Massasoit Community College, a volunteer staff reader for many years for Ploughshares, and he has taught literature classes in two Massachusetts prisons. His poetry has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Drunk Monkeys, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Superpresent Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Molecule, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, The Rest of the Way, was released by Finishing Line Press in August 2022. His website is www.TomLaughlinPoet.com
Jess Levens lives with his wife, sons and dogs in Holliston, Massachusetts, where he draws inspiration from New England’s landscapes and history. His debut chapbook, A Break in the Spine, is available from Alien Buddha Press, and his poetry has been published in The Dillydoun Review, Roi Fainéant Press and Prometheus Dreaming. Jess is a Marine Corps veteran and Northeastern University alum. Follow him on Twitter @levensworks.

DETAILS
Date: SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2023
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
VENUE
Old Manse269 Monument St
Concord, MA 01742 + Google Map
Phone:(978) 369-3909View Venue Website

Poetry Reading, New Books. Mary Buchinger & Hilary Sallick
2023-08-26 15:00 - 17:00 | MA
Saturday, August 26, 3-5 pm

Join NEPC board members Mary Buchinger and Hilary Sallick
on Saturday, August 26, 3-5 PM, for a joint book launch.

Mary Buchinger will read from NAVIGATING THE REACH (Salmon Poetry)
and Hilary Sallick will read from LOVE IS A SHORE (Lily Poetry Review Books).

The event will be held at the St. James Parish Hall, 1991 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge,
near the Porter Square MBTA stop.
Book signing and reception will follow the reading.

This is an accessible venue. All are welcome!

Mary Buchinger will read from
NAVIGATING THE REACH (Salmon Poetry)

Hilary Sallick will read from
LOVE IS A SHORE (Lily Poetry Review Books).

Poetry Reading: Laura Budofsky Wisniewski & Rajiv Mohabir
2023-08-20 15:00 - 17:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of Sanctuary, Vermont which won the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She is also author of the chapbook, How to Prepare Bear. She was a finalist in the 2022 Narrative Poetry Prize, runner up in the 2021 Missouri Review Miller Audio Prize, and winner of Ruminate Magazine’s 2020 Janet B. Mccabe Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry International Prize, and the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry International, Narrative Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Image, and other journals. Laura lives quietly in a small town in Vermont.
Rajiv Mohabir was selected for the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his The Taxidermistʻs Cut, Rajiv Mohabir’s first collection is a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. His second book The Cowherd’s Son won the 2015 Kundiman Prize. In 2021 Mohabir’s poetry collection Cutlish was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mohabir was also awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, published originally in 1916. In 2019 Mohabir also received the New Immigrant Writing Award from Restless Books for his memoir Antiman. His memoir received a Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Adult Nonfiction. Winner of the inaugural chapbook prize by Ghostbird Press for Acoustic Trauma, he is the author of three other multilingual chapbooks: Thunder in the Courtyard: Kajari Poems, A Veil You’ll Cast Aside, na mash me bone, and na bad-eye me. In 2021 he collaborated with Aotearoa based poet Rushi Vyas to write Between Us, Not Half a Saint. While in New York working as a public school teacher, he also produced the nationally broadcast radio show KAVIhouse on JusPunjabi (2012-2013). He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i and teaches in the BFA/MFA program in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College.

2023 Golden Rose Award with Afaa M. Weaver
2023-08-13 15:00 - 17:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Afaa M. Weaver (formerly Michael S.Weaver) is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, several plays, and some short fiction. As a journalist in Baltimore, where he was born in 1951, Afaa wrote for the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Afro-American, and other papers. His awards include a Fulbright appointment, a Guggenheim fellowship, multiple Pushcarts, the PDI Award in playwriting, the Kingsley Tufts, and the 2019 St. Botolph Distinguished Artist Award. His collaborative translation and cultural communication projects with Chinese poets in the U.S. and abroad has earned him national recognition in China, and in Taiwan. He has taught at several colleges and universities in the U.S. and in Taiwan. At Simmons University he held the Alumnae Chair in English for twenty years. Afaa’s newest collection of poetry is A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press). He lives in upstate New York with his wife Kristen Skedgell Weaver.
photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Poetry Reading: Enzo Silon Surin & Joan Houlihan
2023-07-23 15:00 - 17:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born, award-winning poet, educator, librettist, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including When My Body Was A Clinched Fist, winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards for Poetry and the forthcoming collection, American Scapegoat. He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience, and the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a PEN New England Discovery Award and a 2020 Denis Diderot Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. Surin teaches creative writing and literature at Bunker Hill Community College and is also Founding Editor and Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.
Joan Houlihan is the author of six poetry collections, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award from the Boston Author’s Club. Her previous collections include Shadow-feast, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; The Us, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; the sequel Ay; and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; and others. She currently serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan is the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.

Poetry in Translation: Dzvinia Orlowsky & Nidia Hernandez
2023-07-09 15:00 - 17:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart prize poet, an award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six poetry collections by Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, and Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by former national poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a 2019 winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. Her award-winning co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021. She is Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela, and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet and translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, poetry curator, and radio producer. Nidia directs the editorial project lamajadesnuda.com, which won the 2011 WSA prize for Cultural Heritage. She curates Poesiaudio Arrowsmith Press Sundara Ramaswamy Prize 2021, for her assemblage of The Land of Mild Light, selected poems of Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas. She edited in 2022 The Invisible Borders of Time; Five Female Latin American Poets, and is a contributor for Mercurius Magazine. She has presented works drawn from the 34 years of her radio program (also called La maja desnuda) which has more than 1,768 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM in Valencia, Spain. In 2023 she was invited to serve on the board of the New England Poetry Club.

Poetry Reading: Sam Cornish Award with Harris Gardner & Ruth Lepson
2023-06-25 15:00 - 17:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
The Sam Cornish Award is given in recognition of a poet of long-standing artistry, literary advocacy, and generous mentorship who has made a significant impact on the literary communities of New England and beyond.
Harris Gardner has been the Poetry Editor of Ibbetson Street since 2010. He has authored four poetry collections: Chalice of Eros, co-authored with Lainie Senechal; Lest They Become; Among Us; and No Time for Death. His numerous publication credits include The Harvard Review, A Poet’s Siddur, Midstream, Cool Plums, Rosebud, Fulcrum, and many others. He co-founded, with Lainie Senechal, Tapestry of Voices and the Boston National Poetry Month Festival; he also co-founded, with Doug Holder, Breaking Bagels with the Bards. Gardner was Poet-in-Residence at Endicott College from 2002-2005. He founded and hosted many poetry venues over the past 22 years, including Boston Borders, Poetry in The Chapel Series (Forest Hills Cemetery), and Mad Poets Café (Pawtucket, RI). In 2015, Gardner received a Life Time Achievement Award from Ibbetson Street Press and a Citation from the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He is currently a member of the Academy of American Poets.
Ruth Lepson recently retired after 25 years from the New England Conservatory of Music, and is now poet-in-residence emerita. Her books are Dreaming in Color, Morphology and I Went Looking for You, ask anyone, and on the way: new and selected poems. Her anthology, Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, was published by the University of Illinois Press. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals, such as Let the Bucket Down, Ploughshares, Agni, Ping Pong, Ecopoetics, spoKe, and The Brooklyn Rail, and New American Poetry and other anthologies. Lepson has taught at Boston College, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, The Kennedy School, Bentley College, Northeastern, and other Boston-area colleges. Lepson is most proud of volunteering for Oxfam America for 14 years, for which she set up poetry readings to raise money for famine relief. She has collaborated with musicians in all sorts of ways and performed in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Boston. She lives in Cambridge.

Longfellow Student Poetry Awards
2023-06-04 15:00 - 17:00 | Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
Kick off the summer with a celebration of emerging poets! The Longfellow Student Poetry Contest is an annual competition of original poetry, with categories for high school, middle school, and elementary school students. Students will read their winning poems at this ceremony, followed by a celebration on the lawn.
The ceremony concludes with the presentation of the Victor Howes Prize to Mary Gracie Meijer, an undergraduate student at Boston College studying English and Medical Humanities.
The contest aims to encourage and celebrate young poets in exploring their craft, and is co-sponsored by the Frank Buda Memorial Fund, New England Poetry Club, Friends of the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters, and National Park Service.

Poetry at the Old Manse - May
2023-05-28 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
Join the New England Poetry Club outdoors in the open air tent at the Old Manse for free poetry readings on select Sunday afternoons.
Extend your visit by signing up for a tour of the historic house prior to or following the reading. Learn more about tour offerings and pre-register for house tours here. Plan to come early or stay late for a stroll around the orchard and along the banks of the Concord River or bring a picnic to enjoy on the grounds. Register here.
May Poets:
DeWitt Henry’s most recent books are FOUNDLINGS: FOUND POEMS FROM PROSE, (Gazebo Books/Life Before Man, 2022) and RESTLESS FOR WORDS: POEMS (Finishing Line Press, 2023). His memoir, ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS: FAMILY ESSAYS (Mad Hat Press), was long listed for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay, 2022. TRIM RECKONINGS: POEMS will be published by Pierian Springs Press in fall 2023. He was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College. Details at www.dewitthenry.com.
Elizabeth Sylvia lives with her family in southeastern Massachusetts, where she teaches English. Her first book None But Witches (2022), poems inspired by Shakespeare’s female characters, was the winner of the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. Sylvia’s work is upcoming or has recently appeared in Verse Daily, Carve, Cherry Tree, Lily Poetry Review, On the Seawall, The Southern Review, and SWWIM, among others. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by DIAGRAM, 30 West, and Wolfson Press; has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes; and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day.
Pamela Wax, an ordained rabbi, is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and the forthcoming chapbook, Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have received a Best of the Net nomination and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. She has been published in literary journals including Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, About Place Journal, Mudfish, Connecticut River Review, Naugatuck River Review, Pedestal, Split Rock Review, Sixfold, and Passengers Journal. She offers spirituality and poetry workshops online from her home in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.
