New England Poetry Club

PoemCity 2023 Reading
2023-04-08 12:30 - 14:30 (America/New_York) | MA
NEPC Member Ralph Culver will read with Sydney Lea and Samn Stockwell on Saturday, April 8 at 12:30 PM ET at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library, 135 Main St., in Montpelier, Vermont as part of PoemCity 2023, Montpelier’s annual monthlong celebration of National Poetry Month.
This is a free in-person event and fully accessible.

An Evening of Poetry with C.I. Marshall
2023-04-11 17:30 - 19:00 | MA
NEPC Member C.I. Marshall will read in person from her prize-winning book, “The Locksmith Journeys Into the Afterlife” at The Tidepool Book Shop, 372 Chandler Street, Worcester, MA 01602 on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 5:30pm. Join us for an evening of poetry with C.I. (Consuelo) Marshall reading from and discussing her new book. Book signing to follow the reading.

Three Poets @ The Keene Toadstool
2023-04-15 11:00 - 13:00 | Toadstool Bookshops, 12 Emerald St., Keene, NH, 03431, United States
Presented by New England Poetry Club & The Keene Toadstool
Jennifer R. Edwards’ full-length, debut collection is Unsymmetrical Body (Finishing Line Press, 2022). She won the 2022 New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize and was honorably mentioned in 2020. She received a Pushcart Prize nomination from the Poetry Society of NH, a Thomas Lux Poetry Fellowship at Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and support from the Colgate Writers Conference and VCFA Postgraduate Writers' Conference. Her poems appear in literary magazines including Mom Egg Review, One Art, Gyroscope Review, Passengers Journal, Terrain, Literary Mama, Snapdragon, Tiny Spoon, The Racket, Remington Review, FreezeRay Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, and the anthologies Smoky Quartz: Tenth Anniversary Anthology (Monadnock Writers’ Group, 2022) and COVID Spring: Granite State Pandemic Poems (Hobblebush Press, 2020). She currently curates for Button Poetry. Originally from Vermont, she now makes Concord, NH her home and works as an educator and preschool speech-language pathologist. See her work and get in touch at https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards ; Twitter Jennife00420145; Instagram Jenedwards8;
https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/jennifer_r_edwards.
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s debut novel is The Promise of a Normal Life (Arcade Publishing, Feb.2023). Her poetry collections are Girl as Birch, (2022), and OPINEL (2015) Bauhan Publishing. Her work is in these reviews: Agni; Barrow Street; Field; Green Mountains; Greensboro; Interim; Harvard; Massachusetts; Ocean State; Passengers; Salamander; Slate; Tupelo; Antigonish; and VerseDaily, among others. She’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Massachusetts Cultural Council, VSC and VCCA. As Fulbright Scholar she taught in India. She taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years, then founded, and runs The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series.
J. Kates is a minor poet and a literary translator. He has been granted three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accents). He is the translator of a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, edited two anthologies of translations, and collaborated with Stephen A. Sadow on a half dozen books of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish poetry in translation.

April Workshop (Members Only)
2023-04-17 19:00 - 21:00 | MA
The NEPC workshop will meet on the third Monday of the month, September-May, from 7-9 pm on Zoom. Current NEPC members are welcome to participate.

Please contact Mary Buchinger if you’d like to take part or to learn more.

New England Poetry Club at 3rd Space
2023-04-18 18:00 - 21:00 | MA
A FREE evening of poetry readings and music at 3rd Space!
Presented by The New England Poetry Club, local poets Toni Bee, Charles Coe, and David Miller will perform readings. There will also be a performance from folk duo Crowes Pasture.
Complimentary refreshments will be provided; no registration is required.
Tue, Apr. 18, 2023
6:00 PM — 9:00 PM
12 SUMMER STREET
BOSTON, MA 02110

CANCELLED: Poetry at the Old Manse - April
2023-04-30 14:00 - 15:00 | Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA, 01742
Due to inclement weather, this reading has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled at some point in the future.

The Loom Poetry: Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky
2023-04-30 16:30 - 18:30 | The Brick Church, 13 Canal Street, Harrisville, NH, United States
Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky will read in person on Sunday, April 30 at 4:30 EDT as part of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville reading series at the Brick Church, 13 Canal Street, Harrisville NH.

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.

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 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.

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: 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.

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: 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.

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 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

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 – 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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/

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. 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

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.

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.

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. 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.

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
