The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2015: Full Schedule

Welcome to the schedule of the 2015 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, happening May 1-3 in the beautiful and historic town of Salem!

Create a profile by signing up below. Doing so will allow you to create a customized schedule so you can keep track of what you want to attend.

To purchase your attendance button, read articles on our headliners, get tips for where to stay in Salem, and more, visit our website at www.masspoetry.org/festival2015.

8:30pm EDT

Even Though The Whole World Is Burning: W.S. Merwin

Limited Capacity seats available

Introduction by Jonathan Weinert and a post-screening Q&A.

Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin has won almost every major poetry prize that exists, including two Pulitzers. His legacy is based not only upon his writings but also on the singular form of environmental activism and land stewardship he embodies.

Now in his 87th year, Merwin has dedicated over three decades to preserving and regenerating native plants and palms on a 19-acre site on the north shore of Maui, Hawaii. Called the Merwin Conservancy, the preserve holds the most comprehensive private collection of palms in the world, with over 800 species. These tangible actions for the environment go hand-in-hand with his poetry, offering insights for an era marked by environmental degradation and human disconnect with natural processes.

Merwin is a vibrant, humorous and challenging subject, and has not been involved in a feature documentary before. This film is an intimate portrait of a man who is often called a “national treasure.” Running time: 60 minutes.

Speakers

Jonathan Weinert

Jonathan Weinert is co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin (WordFarm, 2012). He is the author of In the Mode of Disappearance (Nightboat Books, 2008), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Thirteen... Read More →

Thursday April 30, 2015 8:30pm - 10:00pm EDT
Cinema Salem Museum Place Mall, 1 E India Square Mall, Salem, MA 01970

Documentary

8:30am EDT

Get Free, Poet!: Workshop with Anthony Febo *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

At times, the hardest thing about writing is starting. In this workshop, we will explore different methods of allowing yourself to get free within your own work. Using various writing prompts and theatre exercises, you will be pushed to use all the artistic abilities that you possess.

Speakers

Anthony Febo

Anthony Febo is a poet, actor, youth worker, lover and friend. He founded Mill City Slam, the adult slam poetry scene, and M.O.M.S. the Middlesex/UMass Lowell college slam poetry scene in 2010. Along side his fellow partners in rhyme, in 2009 he founded FreeVerse!, a youth organization... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 8:30am - 9:30am EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

8:30am EDT

Harlym 1two5 Reading and Q&A *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Come see Harlym 1two5 perform his poetry! After he performs, you'll have the chance to ask him questions.

Harlym 1two5 says:
Find the light under the stairs,
where we boogie til the death of night;
You will find me there,
And then ask me "how does art become vocabulary?"

Speakers

Harlym 1two5 (Jamele Adams)

Harlym 1two5, aka Jamele Adams, is a poetic force to be reckoned with and the Dean of Students at Brandeis University. In his words: "Poetry climbs the limbs of wind soaked dream tops And sherlocked gumdrops missing teeth. Shoot the city And suffocate the criminal. Strangle the miscarriage... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 8:30am - 9:30am EDT
Salem Five Community Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

8:30am EDT

Poetry Sampler *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

For a wide range of voice and style, come to this session to see many poets sharing the stage, each reading one poem. The line-up includes poets from our U35 Reading Series and our SDOP roster.

Speakers

Ruth Ballard

A junior from Littleton High School, Ruth Ballard is runner up for the 2015 Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize. She has been writing and performing spoken word for three years through GrubStreet's Young Adult Writer's Program. Ruth was a finalist in the 2013 Louder Than a Bomb Massachusetts... Read More →

Noah Burton

Noah Burton was born in Kansas City, Kansas and grew up in Virginia. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he studied philosophy and is currently attending the University of New Hampshire's MFA program and teaching at the university. His poems have appeared in Burningword, The... Read More →

William Dowd

Will Dowd is a writer currently living and working in Braintree, Massachusetts. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where he was a national Jacob K. Javits Fellow in poetry. He also received an MS from MIT. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Barrow... Read More →

Joseph Gould

Joey Gould is a tutor, poet, & deckbuilder who loves creating improv poetry & walking through Audubon sanctuaries. He has helped facilitate four poetry festivals & was only picked up by the police once.

Heather Hughes

Heather Hughes hangs her heart in her native Miami and her current town of Somerville. Her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Prelude, Sidereal Magazine, and others; and her reviews have featured in venues such as The Rumpus. She is a... Read More →

Frances Kimpel

Frances Kimpel is a performance and creative artist currently residing in Waltham, Massachusetts. Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, she maintains a marked love the region's characterizing rain, cold seas, and pervasive evergreen. Frances completed her BA at Brandeis University... Read More →

Hannah Larrabee

Matt Parker

Matt Parker has been an avid fan of poetry since his childhood in the 1980's, and used it as a life saver during his tumultuous adolescence of the 1990's. Matt began to share his poetry and encourage others to use it as a coping tool in his career field as a youth development professional... Read More →

Curtis Perdue

Curtis Perdue is the author of two chapbooks: We're Happy Our Original Dance (Zoo Cake Press, 2014) and You Will Island (H_NGM_N, 2012). He edits the online journal of poetry and art www.interrupture.com, teaches 7th grade English in East Boston, and lives in Swampscott, MA... Read More →

Amanda Grace Shu

Amanda Grace Shu has been writing stories since the age of four--or so her mother claims. She focuses mainly on writing fantasy, science fiction, and, of course, poetry, but will occasionally poke her head out of the clouds and participate in what is known as "real life." She is fascinated... Read More →

Denise Warren

Denise Warren lives, writes, and works in the suburbs of Boston. By day she is a typo vigilante, working as a copy editor at an ad agency. When she was interviewed for the job, she was asked whether she watched the show Mad Men. She said no but they gave her the job anyway. She is... Read More →

Annie Won

Annie Won is a poet, yoga teacher, and medicinal chemist who resides in Somerville, MA. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Juniper Writing Institute scholarship recipient. Her chapbook with Brenda Iijima, Once Upon a Building Block, recently published with Horse Less Press (2014) and... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 8:30am - 9:30am EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

8:30am EDT

Words that Slay the Monsters--How to Write Through Your Fear: Workshop with Krysten Hill *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Warrior poet Audre Lorde declares, “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” Here, Lorde speaks to how writers can make poetry a tool that pushes through fear in order to create powerful poems that are honest visions of the world. This workshop will explore how to write poems that risk and have the power to make a difference. We will look at examples of poems that tackle difficult subjects, and discuss how writers push through the taboo and create poems with intention and bravery. Students will also have an opportunity to craft and share their own manifestos that break through their fears in order to speak out and make a difference. In this workshop, students will explore how writers have the authority to address complicated settings and feelings in order to craft testaments to our strength and our devotion to honest visions of the world.

Speakers

Krysten Hill

Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, POETRY, Up the Staircase Quarterly, PANK, Winter Tangerine... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 8:30am - 9:30am EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

8:30am EDT

Writing From Memory: Workshop with Tara Skurtu *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Personal memory is a trust fund of images, stories, and senses. And, in a way, it functions very much like a poem—its logic isn't chronological, it makes connections between seemingly unrelated moments, and it's always in a state of movement. In this workshop, we'll use prompts that allow us to travel into our memories and write unpredictable, spontaneous, and surprising poetry.

Speakers

Tara Skurtu

Poet, Teacher, Translator, Boston University Prison Education Program

Tara Skurtu, originally from South Florida, is a poet and translator living in Boston. She is the recipient of a 2015-16 Fulbright, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and two Academy of American Poets prizes. Tara teaches incarcerated college students through Boston University's Prison... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 8:30am - 9:30am EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

9:40am EDT

Beast Mode: Be a Beast *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

By the time we are done, we would have moved the world a little bit and re-imagined the lines by which poetry is defined. Writing is the spark that ignites flames of thought; thus your poetry leaves a trail of blue flames-the core of any fire. A kaleidoscope of creativity unleashed and unveiled "write" from you. Let us begin.

Speakers

Harlym 1two5 (Jamele Adams)

Friday May 1, 2015 9:40am - 10:40am EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

9:40am EDT

Krysten Hill Reading and Q&A *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Come see poetic powerhouse Krysten Hill share her poetry. After, you'll have time to ask her questions.

She says:

I write poems that explore black female identity through narrative. I like to use the stories, history, and conversations that I find. I take notes from poets like Patricia Smith, Jan Beatty, and Audre Lorde who are invested in the honesty of experience. These writers believe in ending the silence and mistranslation of their experiences and inserting their own honest voices into their narratives. Many poems start from what I am reluctant to talk about at first.

Feel free to ask me about:

What you want to know about developing as an artist
How to find the subject matter that works for you
The challenges of being an artist
Artists who have inspired me and why it is important to find your inspiration
The importance of community for an artist
The importance of being an observer and student of the world
What I’m working on at this moment

Speakers

Krysten Hill

Friday May 1, 2015 9:40am - 10:40am EDT
Salem Five Community Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

9:40am EDT

Reading and Open Mic: Anthony Febo, José Olivarez, Rachel Wiley *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Come have your socks knocked off by Anthony Febo, José Olivarez, and Rachel Wiley! Then wow the crowd with a poem of your own.

Speakers

Anthony Febo

José Olivarez

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. Originally from Calumet City, IL, he lives in the Bronx. He is a graduate of Harvard University, the Poet-Linc Manager for Lincoln Center Education, and he is an editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. He has performed and taught at high... Read More →

Rachel Wiley

Rachel Wiley is known for her honest, witty, and sometimes sassy poetry that touches body image, romance, and feminism. From Columbus, Ohio, she attended the Theatre Studies program at Capital University. She tours colleges and slam venues nationwide. Her work has been featured by... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 9:40am - 10:40am EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

9:40am EDT

Social Justice, Tragedy, and the Poet as Witness: Workshop with Karen Sharpe *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Facebook. Snapchat. Twitter. Instagram. Personal blogs. News blogs. Food blogs. Live streaming. Youtube. Cable. Email. What is the role of the poet in today’s smorgasboard of media and information where the injustices and wrongdoings of humanity are often overshadowed by the endless stream of celebrity and personal news? Can we – and should we -- tune out the distractions and bear witness to our personal and societal aggressions and tragedies for the greater good? This workshop will begin with a discussion on the role of the poet as witness. Sample poems will be shared and discussed and students will write from a selection of related prompts.

Speakers

Karen Sharpe

Friday May 1, 2015 9:40am - 10:40am EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

9:40am EDT

Tara Skurtu Reading and Q&A *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Come see Tara Skurtu share her poetry. You'll also have the chance to ask her questions!

A note from Tara:
Every time I sit down to write a poem, I think, what the heck do I know about writing a poem? I never know exactly what I'm doing or where each poem will end up, but there's some part of me that trusts myself to get there. This unknowing part of the writing process, to me, is where the poetry happens. Most of my poems derive from experience, photographs, and memories. Lately, after spending time abroad, I find myself writing about the limits of language, love, and distance. In my reading, you'll hear an assortment of poems from my manuscript, The Amoeba Game. We can discuss anything about the writing process you'd like. Seriously, ask me anything--about writing and revision, poems in response to social justice issues, translation, how traveling changed my poetry, how to get unstuck when you're feeling writer's block. I look forward to reading poems and meeting all of you!

Speakers

Tara Skurtu

Poet, Teacher, Translator, Boston University Prison Education Program

Friday May 1, 2015 9:40am - 10:40am EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

10:50am EDT

Cartoons Have Feelings, Too: Workshop with José Olivarez *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Sometimes the best way to write about ourselves is to put on a mask. It might be hard to talk about how we experience love, but thinking about how a turtle experiences love might be easier. What does a flamingo have to say about gender roles? What does Bugs Bunny think about Hip Hop? In this workshop we will read persona poems from the perspective of a lobster, a mosquito, and the Road-Runner. Persona poems are poems written in the voice of someone or something else. We will write our own persona poems to play with the voice of someone else and learn more about ourselves in the process.

Speakers

José Olivarez

Friday May 1, 2015 10:50am - 11:50am EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

10:50am EDT

Freewriting Fun Time: Workshop with Jill McDonough *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Freewriting is an old trick: set a timer, write whatever comes into your head, and sift through it for gold. This workshop will be built around freewriting—excavations of your subconscious and conscious thoughts—to spark and develop detailed assignments for longer, more polished work. We will work together to construct these assignments, to help you get at what you want to write, your style, your voice, and the form that best expresses those. Individualized assignments will help you combine and expand your freewrites into poems you can be proud of.

Speakers

Jill McDonough

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Three-time Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough is the recipient of Lannan, NEA, Cullman Center, and Stegner fellowships. Her most recent book is Reaper (Alice James, 2017); Here All Night, her fifth collection, is forthcoming from Alice James Books. She teaches in the MFA program... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 10:50am - 11:50am EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

10:50am EDT

Lloyd Schwartz's Master Class in Reading Your Own Work Aloud *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

In the literary world today, writers often reach a wider audience through readings than through publication. Yet most writers are not trained to read their works aloud. Even well-known writers may read with too little—or too much—expression. In this master class/workshop, participants discuss what makes a good reading and explore the wide range of successful reading styles. Participants present a poem for feedback from the group, under the guidance of the instructor, and then work toward a livelier, more effective presentation, which often includes a deeper understanding of the work being read.

Speakers

Lloyd Schwartz

Frederick S. Troy Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston

Lloyd Schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and teaches in the MFA program. He is a commentator on music and the arts for National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Senior Editor of Classical Music for New York Arts, and Contributing... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 10:50am - 11:50am EDT
Salem Five Community Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

10:50am EDT

Rachel Wiley Reading and Q&A *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Come see Rachel Wiley share her powerful poetry. Then you'll be able to ask her questions.

Speakers

Rachel Wiley

Friday May 1, 2015 10:50am - 11:50am EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

10:50am EDT

Reading and Open Mic: Harlym 1two5, Krysten Hill, Tara Skurtu *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Harlym 1two5, Krysten Hill, and Tara Skurtu will blow your mind in this group reading. Then you'll have the opportunity to share one of your poems in the open mic!

Speakers

Harlym 1two5 (Jamele Adams)

Krysten Hill

Tara Skurtu

Poet, Teacher, Translator, Boston University Prison Education Program

Friday May 1, 2015 10:50am - 11:50am EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

12:00pm EDT

José Olivarez Reading and Q&A *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Come see José Olivarez read his poetry! You'll also have time to ask him questions.

José says:
Ask me about Hip Hop and how it affects my writing. Ask me about why I like writing love poems. Ask me about basketball, my favorite rappers, and the hardest part of writing poetry. Ask me about joy. Ask me about sadness. Ask me about poetry slam. Ask me about writing books. Ask me anything!

Speakers

José Olivarez

Friday May 1, 2015 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Salem Five Community Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

12:00pm EDT

Reading: Jill McDonough, Lloyd Schwartz & Their UMass Boston MFA Students *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Jill McDonough and Lloyd Schwartz will read with a handful of students from the MFA program at Umass Boston, where they both teach.

Speakers

Lewis Feuer

Lewis Feuer is a MFA candidate at UMass Boston. His essay [Listening] was recently published by Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room as part of their Catalyst series. His work has also appeared in or is forthcoming from NO INFINITE a Journal of Art, Poetry & Protest. He teachings... Read More →

Joshua Jones

Joshua Jones, originally from the Shenandoah Valley, is a candidate for the MFA in creative writing at UMass Boston. He has poems published in or forthcoming from Fourteen Hills, Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, and The Mayo Review. He lives in Dorchester with his wonderfully nerdy wife... Read More →

Jill McDonough

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Lloyd Schwartz

Frederick S. Troy Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston

Lori Zimmermann

Lori Zimmermann is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Boston. She writes poems about apocalypses and the telegraph. She is also the Tumblr Editor for small publisher/guerrilla art project Broadsided Press. When she is not clacking away at her typewriter or laptop, she enjoys spinsterly... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

12:00pm EDT

Silly Image, Serious Thought: A Comedy Club in the Poetic Temple: A Workshop with Noah Burton *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

Sometimes sitting on a rock in silence doesn't bring enlightenment—but throwing a mud pie does. Go figure! In this workshop you'll see how being silly and playful with images can lead you to deeply personal and universal discoveries that, in turn, complete a poem. With a clown car as your transport, who knows, maybe you'll see the universe or travel the highways of your conciousness? And maybe we'll join you too.

Speakers

Noah Burton

Friday May 1, 2015 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

12:00pm EDT

Write it Beautiful: Workshop with Rachel Wiley *Student Track*

Limited Capacity seats available

In this workshop, we will consider and cultivate the language we use to write a love letter to something long lost.

Speakers

Rachel Wiley

Friday May 1, 2015 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Student Day of Poetry Track (Students Only)

1:15pm EDT

Teaching as Witness and Transmission: How Poetry Can Be Taught

Limited Capacity seats available

Much has been debated about whether poetry can be taught. The proliferation of MFA programs is seen as an attempt to further commodify an art that in today’s world holds little monetary value. But poetry is a practice, not a commodity; and teaching is the cultivation of a generous relationship involving the age-old passing of artistic lineage through direct witness and transmission. This event brings together one such lineage, beginning contemporarily with Olga Broumas (Beginning with O, Pastoral Jazz), continuing through her student of 32 years Melanie Braverman (East Justice, Red), and down through students of both. The discussion will be brief; more time will be given to readings from teachers and students as demonstration of the way in which teaching may be received, transformed and interpreted, and passed along.

Speakers

Melanie Braverman

Ask Melanie Braverman anything. She is currently, or has been: writer, artist, artist's assistant, student, teacher, parent, administrator, spouse, keeper of chickens. What she don't know she'll make up.

Volunteers

Diana Fish

Friday May 1, 2015 1:15pm - 2:15pm EDT
Salem Five Community Room

Group Reading

1:15pm EDT

Poetry of Place: Mapping our Migrations

Limited Capacity seats available

This panel explores how a sense of place can illuminate and inspire poetry. The poets in this session have crossed many boundaries: national, spiritual, and emotional. Some of the poems evoke a sense of exile while others describe the loss of place to environmental degradation. The poet is a soul cartographer, mapping terrain: both real and imagined. The poets in the panel have journeyed through many lands, including: Jordan, Israel, Brazil, Puerto Rico, India, Spain, and Greece. Their poems reflect these journeys and migrations.

Moderators

Deborah Leipziger

Author. Advisor. Poet

Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and advisor on sustainability. Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of Story & Bone, published by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her poems have been published in the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Israel and the Netherlands, in such magazines... Read More →

Speakers

Ray Fahrner

Director, Office of Performing Arts, Colleges of the Fenway

Ray Fahrner is an award-winning composer, conductor, database designer, writer and arts administrator, living in Cambridge, MA. His eclectic compositions include Colleges of Funk, for jazz band; CIRCLE: A Circus for Mime and Orchestra; and ten works for chamber chorus. As a choral... Read More →

Leah Meryl Harmon

Leah Meryl Harmon was born in Boston Massachusetts. She attended Berklee Collage of Music, and The University of Massachusetts Boston, earning her BA with a concentration in poetry and a minor in art history. She is a singer/ songwriter. She currently lives in the Boston area where... Read More →

Janice Silverman Rebibo

Poet / Editor / Translator

Janice Silverman Rebibo’s poetry has been widely published and reviewed since she was first launched into print by esteemed Israeli poet, Chaim Gouri. Her English language poetry has been called “fresh and compelling”, having “an intriguing sense of humor”, and showing “just... Read More →

Bill Yarrow

Professor of English, Joliet Junior College

Bill Yarrow is the author of Blasphemer (Lit Fest Press 2015) and Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX 2012). His poems have appeared in many print and online magazines including Poetry International, DIAGRAM, FRiGG, Van Gogh's Ear, Thrush Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, RHINO, and PANK. He is as... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 1:15pm - 2:15pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Poetry with Music

1:15pm EDT

Because, the Internet: A Workshop in Digital Age Poetics

Limited Capacity seats available

What role does poetry play in a world plagued with techno-babble? Bring your smartphones, laptops, and tablets for an interactive workshop exploring the ways in which the Internet and social media inform our poetic sensibilities. Led by the editors of Window Cat Press, a Boston-based online literary journal inspired by memes, we’ll examine established forms of modern text and multimedia that incorporate the Internet, such as flarf, Google poems, and hyperlink poetry, then explore ways to create our own pieces through gif set ekphrasis and other exercises. Come celebrate the ways our lives intertwine via the Internet, and bring the fun back to creative expression.

Speakers

Kim Dela Cruz

Editor, Window Cat Press

Kim Dela Cruz is a pun-loving Boston-area poet and freelance editor, whose most recent poems can be found in places like Broad! and Every Day Poets. She's co-editor of Window Cat Press, an online lit & art zine for emerging content creators. Her current project is a collection of... Read More →

E. Lev Friedland

Emily Jaeger

Poet, Editor, Window Cat Press

Emily Jaeger is an MFA candidate at UMASS Boston and co-editor/co-founder of Window Cat Press. A Literary Lambda and TENT fellow, her poetry has appeared in Four Way Review, Soundings East, and Rust + Moth among others. Her chapbook The Evolution of Parasites is forthcoming from Sibling... Read More →

Producers

Kim Dela Cruz

Editor, Window Cat Press

Friday May 1, 2015 1:15pm - 2:15pm EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Workshop

1:15pm EDT

When Imitations Work (and When They Don’t): Five Writing Ideas

Limited Capacity seats available

We’ll look at five on-the-spot writing assignments based on poems by Osip Mandelstam, Gottfried Benn, Mary Szybist, Michael Dickman, and Jane Hirshfield. Participants will pick one assignment to try on the spot. We’ll want to discover how this method of imitating the structure (not necessarily the content) of poems works for us, and when it doesn’t. How can the reader (and, indeed, the poet) know the difference? This method of imitation (like learning a new dance step) can produce many surprises. But on the other hand, when might it progress beyond mere experimentation?

Speakers

Alan Feldman

Friday May 1, 2015 1:15pm - 2:15pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Workshop

2:30pm EDT

Mediterranean Voices: Ancient Echoes Modern Lives

Limited Capacity seats available

Five women poets from diverse backgrounds explore the insistence and echoes of the ancient through revisionary myth making or through the acknowledgement of Old-World paths and visions in their very modern lives and work. Mediterranean echoes emerge in both the content and forms in the work they present and each poet explores its influence in unique ways: Greek myths unravel and are revised to tell our contemporary stories, deep memories in Italian or Greek American backgrounds surface, ancient landscapes become familiar dreamscapes in the poets' current lives.

Speakers

Ellen Goldstein

Ellen Goldstein was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Common, Measure, StorySouth, Solstice, Muddy River Review, and Post Road, as well as in the anthologies Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014, Bloomsbury Anthology of... Read More →

Julia Lisella

Assoc. Prof., Regis College

Julia Lisella's books include a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press), and two full length collections, Always & Terrain, both from WordTech Editions. Her poems can be found in journals and anthologies, print and online--Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Prairie... Read More →

Rosemary Starace

Rosemary Starace is a writer and visual artist living in Pittsfield, MA, USA. Her poems have appeared in Orion, Blueline, Yew, Studio, Lake, and other journals and books. She is author of the poetry collection, Requitements (Elephant Tree House), and co-editor, with Moira Richards... Read More →

Theodora Stratis

Theodora Stratis writes about everyday life, often against the background of her Greek heritage. She is interested in the dual sense of belonging to and isolation from community and family, and explores the theme of zenitia, or otherness. She has participated in local readings including... Read More →

Cammy Thomas

Cammy Thomas’ first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Both it and her second book, Inscriptions, are published by Four Way Books. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete Inscriptions... Read More →

Producers

Julia Lisella

Assoc. Prof., Regis College

Friday May 1, 2015 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Group Reading

2:30pm EDT

Passing Through a Phase: Revelations of Age

Limited Capacity seats available

Aging brings about a reshuffling of perspective and priorities regarding the self and others. It raises questions not just about the physical process of getting older, but also about the world without us: how do we address the future? How do we think about legacies, about mortality and what we will leave behind? As Stanley Kunitz writes, “Maybe/ it’s time for me to practice/ growing old. The way I look/ at it, I’m passing through a phase:/ gradually I’m changing to a word.” What does the world look like from old age? This reading features three accomplished poets who offer their own distinct revelations.

Speakers

Alan Feldman

Claire Keyes

Claire Keyes has published reviews and poems in The Women's Review of Books, The Georgia Review, Calyx and Rattle, among others. On-line, you can find her work at Tattoohighway.org,Poemeleon.org, and poetrymagazine.org. She recently won the Robert Penn Warren Award (First Prize) from New England Writers. Her poetry collections include The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts and teaches in the Lifelong Learning Program at Salem State College... Read More →

James Scrimgeour

Dr. James R. Scrimgeour is a Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University who has been writing a poem per week since 1993. He has published nine books of poetry and over 200 poems in anthologies and periodicals and has given over 150 public readings of his work. He has... Read More →

Producers

J.D. Scrimgeour

A long-time professor at Salem State, J.D. Scrimgeour lives in Salem and has written extensively about sports, especially baseball and basketball. His five books include the basketball memoir, Spin Moves. He also appears in the anthology Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Group Reading

2:30pm EDT

The Poetry of Home

Limited Capacity seats available

This program will involve the reading of poems focusing on the subject of "home" with its many possibilities ranging from the domestic pleasures of "home sweet home," to the more complex, sometimes dark, associations of homes not so sweet. It will include some discussion of the special challenges of writing about he subject of home. As Frost said, "Home is the place, when you go there,/They have to take you in." What else might a poetic home be?

Moderators

Ann Taylor

Professor of English, Salem State University

Ann Taylor is a Professor of English at Salem State University. She has published textbooks on writing, a collection of personal essays on birdwatching,Watching Birds, and poems in a variety of places. Her first book of poetry, The River Within, won first prize at Ravenna Press' Cathlamet... Read More →

Speakers

Francis Blessington

Francis Blessington is a poet, novelist, translator, critic, and professor of English at Northeastern University. He has published two books of poems, Wolf Howl and Lantskip; Paradise Lost: Ideal and Tragic Epic, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic, and a novel, The Last Witch of... Read More →

Susan Donnelly

Susan Donnelly is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent Capture the Flag. Published in Poetry, The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere, including two poems currently in Irish journals, she had a poem featured in December in Nicholas Kristof's... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Group Reading

2:30pm EDT

Richard Hoffman and Marge Piercy Friday Afternoon Opening Headline Event

Limited Capacity seats available

Not to be missed! Catch headline poets Richard Hoffman and Marge Piercy.

Speakers

Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is author of the Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections,Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference... Read More →

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women, and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time; 19 volumes of poetry including her most recent Made in Detroit (Knopf... Read More →

Producers

Laurin Macios

Volunteers

Diana Fish

Friday May 1, 2015 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Salem Five Community Room

Headline Event

3:30pm EDT

Poetry Meet-up at Howling Wolf

Get your mingle on at Howling Wolf! Rub elbows and wax poetic with poets and festival organizers, including Executive Director January O’Neil, Program Director Laurin Macios, and Co-founder Michael Ansara, among others.

Speakers

Michael Ansara

Laurin Macios

Program Director, Mass Poetry

Laurin Macios was born in Miami, Florida and raised just short of everywhere (Florida, Germany, North Carolina, Colorado, and Holland). She has her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New Hampshire and is Program Director of Mass Poetry. She previously worked... Read More →

January O'Neil

Associate Professor, Salem State University

January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (forthcoming, 2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the... Read More →

Friday May 1, 2015 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Howling Wolf Taqueria 76 Lafayette St, Salem, MA 01970

Meet-up

3:45pm EDT

After Great Pain: The Poetics of Recovery

Limited Capacity seats available

How does a poet attempt to understand, and then write about, those events which have caused pain? Does writing the poem imply a kind of recuperation? There are many kinds of pain, from personal to political, from physical to spiritual. How do we engage with these elements in our work? What is the relation, if any, between aesthetics and recovery? The poets on this panel will read from their works, and then speak from different perspectives about this relation.

Speakers

Martha Collins

Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published by Pittsburgh in fall 2022, and her fifth collection of co-translated Vietnamese poetry will be published by Milkweed in May 2023. Her tenth poetry book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019... Read More →

Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan’s most recent book of poetry is Shadow-feast (Four Way Books, March, 2018). Her four previous books of poetry include The Mending Worm (2006), winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press; The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009), named a 2009 must-read by the Massachusetts... Read More →

Kathy Nilsson

Kathy Nilsson earned a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her book The Infant Scholar was published by Tupelo Press in January 2015 and won Honorable Mention, Berkshire Prize for a first or second book chosen by Tupelo Press Editors. Her... Read More →

Cammy Thomas

Daniel Tobin

Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing, Emerson College

Daniel Tobin is the author of six books of poems, Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry), and The Net (2014). His seventh book of poems, From Nothing, is forthcoming in 2016. He is the author... Read More →

Producers

Cammy Thomas

Friday May 1, 2015 3:45pm - 4:45pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Group Reading

7:30pm EDT

Denise Duhamel, Nick Flynn, and Adrian Matejka

Limited Capacity seats available

This is a reading you won’t want to miss. Join us for an extraordinary night of poetry with Denise Duhamel, Nick Flynn, and Adrian Matejka.

Speakers

Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of a 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005),Queen... Read More →

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn’s “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City” (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has been translated into ten languages. He is also the author of two book of poetry, “Some Ether” (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce... Read More →

Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His first collection of poems,The Devil’s Garden, won the 2002 New York / New England Award... Read More →

Producers

Laurin Macios

Friday May 1, 2015 7:30pm - 9:00pm EDT
PEM Atrium

Headline Event

9:30am EDT

Four Way Books Authors Reading

Limited Capacity seats available

Four Way Books seeks to please and expand poetry’s audience and to nurture the gifts of adult writers, spanning a wide range of geographic, cultural, and economic backgrounds.

Poets Andrea Cohen, Cynthia Cruz, Rachel Eliza Griffiths and Gregory Pardlo present excerpts from their published and unpublished works.

Speakers

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. A new book of poems, The Sorrow Apartments, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Other collections include... Read More →

Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz's first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Books and her second collection, The Glimmering Room, was published by Four Way Books in 2012.Wunderkammer, her third collection, was published by Four Way Books in 2014. She has received fellowships from... Read More →

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and photographer. She received the MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware and the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the recipient of fellowships including Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem Foundation... Read More →

Gregory Pardlo

Teaching Fellow, Columbia University

Gregory Pardlo's collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Digest was also shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts... Read More →

Producers

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Saturday May 2, 2015 9:30am - 10:30am EDT
Universalist Church

Group Reading

9:30am EDT

Unvarnished: Telling the Truth about Aging

Limited Capacity seats available

How can we enlarge our experience of aging in a culture that instills fear and self-loathing? Listen to Gail Thomas, Mary Clare Powell, Sally Bellerose, and Terry S. Johnson read their poems about bodies, sex, class, family and dying with humor, grace and authenticity. Grappling with issues of caretaking and caregiving, loss and grief, as well as freedom and joy, these well-crafted poems of substance are delivered by writers who are also engaging readers. Their books and lively readings have found a wide audience across the state. Whether you are "of a certain age" or looking for models of positive, outrageous aging, you will be moved.

Moderators

Gail Thomas

Poet & Educator

Gail Thomas has published six books, most recently Trail of Roots and Leaving Paradise. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Among her awards are the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, the Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck... Read More →

Speakers

Sally Bellerose

In her writing, Sally Bellerose loves to mess with rhythm, rhyme, and awkward emotion. Bellerose writes about class, sex, illness, absurdity, and lately, growing old. Her novel The Girls Club, http://www.bywaterbooks.com/shop/the-girls-club won many awards including an NEA Fellowship... Read More →

Terry S. Johnson

Terry S. Johnson has explored careers as a newspaper advertising clerk, a library assistant and a professional harpsichordist before serving as a public school teacher for over twenty-five years. She earned her M.F.A. in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published... Read More →

Mary Clare Powell

Dr. Mary Clare Powell is a professor at Lesley University in the Creative Arts in Learning Division where she teaches poetry in this M.Ed. program in integrated arts to teachers across the country. In the last 25 years, she has published books on women and the future; the arts, education... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 9:30am - 10:30am EDT
Hawthorne Library

Group Reading

9:30am EDT

Edna St. Vincent Millay's Massachusetts Poetry

Limited Capacity seats available

Edna St. Vincent Millay spent formative years in coastal Massachusetts and her connection to the unique lifestyle of the region influenced her life and her work. As an adult, developing a true social conscience she turned to the political structure of the state, went to jail in Boston for her beliefs and wrote some of her finest pieces to awaken the American audience to the world's darkest affairs. As a Berkshire poet (though living on the western slope of the Taconic range) she sought to influence Massachusetts politics with her words.

Speakers

J. Peter Bergman

Director of Communications, The Berkshire Historical Society at Herman Melville's Arrowhead

J. Peter Bergman was the Executive Director of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society at Steepletop From 2007 through 2013 where he created all programs, exhibits, publications and the actual historic house museum in Austerlitz, NY. A published playwright (Maids in the Mills), novelist... Read More →

Volunteers

Amanda Hope

Poet & librarian

Saturday May 2, 2015 9:30am - 10:30am EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Workshop

9:30am EDT

The Poetry of Work

Limited Capacity seats available

Finding a balance between working life and writing life can be a challenge, especially for writers whose day jobs don't necessarily align with their passions. In the midst of that struggle, it may be easy to forget poetry's role as a powerful conduit for human experience--even when that experience may feel like something to 'get through' before starting in on the real work. In this workshop, we'll look at poems centered on working and the workplace, and try out some writing exercises designed to bring together these often disparate aspects of a writer's life.

Speakers

Maggie Cleveland

Curriculum Development & Credentialing Manager, National Elevator Industry Educational Program

Maggie Cleveland hails from the seacoast town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and develops training and certifications for Union Elevator Mechanics through the National Elevator Industry Educational Program. Her poems have been published in journals including The Offending Adam, qarrtsiluni... Read More →

Susan Eisenberg

Susan Eisenberg is a poet, visual artist and licensed electrician, who plays with scale and juxtaposition to investigate issues of power and social policy. A Resident Artist/Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, she is author of the poetry collections... Read More →

Producers

Maggie Cleveland

Curriculum Development & Credentialing Manager, National Elevator Industry Educational Program

Volunteers

Cindy Herrick

Abigail Warren

Associate Professor, Cambridge College

writingteaching

Saturday May 2, 2015 9:30am - 10:30am EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Workshop

10:00am EDT

Giant Scrabble Game

Cooperate—or compete—to cover a giant Scrabble board with hundreds of criss-crossed words.

Saturday May 2, 2015 10:00am - 4:00pm EDT
PEM Atrium

Drop-in Activities

10:00am EDT

Mad-Lib Muse

Loosen up your imagination using a childhood game as a creative prompt. Get the words flowing with fill-in-the-blank templates.

Saturday May 2, 2015 10:00am - 4:00pm EDT
PEM Atrium

Drop-in Activities

10:00am EDT

Paint Chip Poetry

Choose a swatch and let the colors inspire you with words and images.

Saturday May 2, 2015 10:00am - 4:00pm EDT
PEM Atrium

Drop-in Activities

11:00am EDT

Hedgerow Reads

Limited Capacity seats available

“There is something special happening here,” says publisher Steve Strimer, who started Hedgerow Books in the spirit of City Lights Book Store, to bring regional artists to national attention. In its short existence, Hedgerow's publications have been honored as finalists for The Massachusetts Book Award, The Eric Hoffer Award in Poetry, The Montaigne Medal, and The International Book Award. Five poets will read poems with surprising vistas of fantasy, landscape, history, relationship and slant wisdoms.

Moderators

D M Gordon

Editor, Hedgerow Books

D.M. Gordon is a writer and editor in multiple genres, helping poets polish their manuscripts before submission, and novelists and creative non-fiction writers untangle their narrative structures––or whatever other elements need attention. It's work that she loves. Her poetry... Read More →

Speakers

Maya Janson

Poet, Lecturer, Smith College

Maya Janson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Orion, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Murmur & Crush, a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2013. She is a lecturer in poetry at Smith College and has been a recipient... Read More →

Patricia Lee Lewis

Founder/Director, Patchwork Farm Retreat

Patricia Lee Lewis leads creative writing & yoga retreats at Patchwork Farm in Western MA and internationally and loves to talk about Hedgerow Books, experimental poetry, unusual venues for readings, supportive workshops, and building a writers' community.

Fred Pelka

Fred Pelka is a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, The Disability Edge, Mainstream, Poets and Writers, and elsewhere. He is the author of the ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement (ABC-CLIO, 1997... Read More →

Anne Love Woodhull

Writing is something Anne Love Woodhull seems to have to do. She loves writing, and its task of wrestling something into form. She loves reading the writing of others. She also works with children as an art therapist. She is interested in the issues of education, and just what does... Read More →

Producers

Diana Gordon

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Universalist Church

Group Reading

11:00am EDT

Smack Down: Cape Ann Poets vs. Cape Cod Poets

Limited Capacity seats available

A fast-paced, unscripted Smack Down between a team of Cape Ann poets (Kevin Carey, MP Carver, Jennifer Martelli, Colleen Michaels, with Jennifer Jean, team leader) and a team of Cape Cod poets (Gregory Hischak, Carole Stasiowski, Lauren Wolk, Jason Mellin (or Marney Rathbun), with Christine Ernst, team leader) vie for the title THE CAPE. Without knowing the other team's poetry, the team leader will dispatch her team's poet to immediately respond to the other team's poem. Alice Kociemba will act as time-keeper and referee. Poets will be dressed in "super-poet capes" representing their region. Audience applause and secret judges will decide the winning team. The losing team will eat "humble pie" and buy THE CAPE a round of drinks at the nearest pub.

Moderators

Alice Kociemba

Founding Director, Calliope—Poetry for Community

Alice Kociemba is a co-editor of From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod and the Islands Through Poetry (Bass River Press, forthcoming) along with Robin Smith-Johnson and Rich Youmans. She is founding director of Calliope Poetry and is the author of Bourne Bridge (Turning Point... Read More →

Speakers

Kevin Carey

Kevin Carey is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. Books include: The Beach People (2014), The One Fifteen to Penn Station (2012), Jesus Was a Homeboy (2016) which was an Honor book for the Paterson Literary Prize, & Set in Stone (2020). His poems have appeared... Read More →

Christine Ernst

Cotuit Center for the Arts

Christine Rathbun Ernst is a writer and performance poet. She has been featured in the magazines MAMM, The Cape Cod View, Cape Cod Magazine, Cape Cod Life, the literary journal Ars Medica, and The Boston Globe, and two of her plays have been named MCC Grant Finalists. She spends her... Read More →

Gregory Hischak

Jennifer Jean

Program Manager, 24PearlStreet Online Writing Program at FAWC

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ and The Fool, as well as Object Lesson which is about sex-trafficking and objectification in America. Her teaching resource is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry and she's a co-editor and co-translator of an anthology in development... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Library

Group Reading

11:00am EDT

You Probably Think This Poem Is About You: lovers, friends, family and children

Limited Capacity seats available

Good poems tell the truth. As poets, we dig deep to create an honest, authentic experience on the page, but what happens when telling the truth hurts or exposes family members or loved ones? What happens when our version of events differs from the memories of others? Should we ask permission? Are there boundaries and responsibilities or are we always free to tell our own truth as we see it? Six poets read and discuss their own practices. Join us for a conversation about how private experience is transformed into public art.

Moderators

Erin Trahan

Speakers

Brian Burt

Gadabout

Brian Burt is the author of the poetry collection, "Past Continuous" (Back Pages Publishers, 2015). His poems, photographs, and visual art have appeared or are forthcoming in a wide variety of publications in North America and Europe, most recently FUSION, The Waterhouse Review, The... Read More →

Amy Clark

Amy M. Clark’s most recent collection is a chapbook, A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation, co-authored with Molly Peacock (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her debut book, Stray Home (University of North Texas Press, 2010), won the Vassar Miller Prize... Read More →

Kirun Kapur

Kirun Kapur's collections include Women in the Waiting Room, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist, which won the Antivenom Poetry Award. Her work’s appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, and Prairie Schooner. She’s an editor for the Beloit Poetry... Read More →

Beth Platow

Lynne Potts

Lynne Potts’s first book of poetry, Porthole View, won the National Poetry Review Press prize in 2012. The same press is publishing a second book Mame, Sol and Dog Bark in 2015. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Southern Poetry Review, California Quarterly, Meridian, American... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
PEM Studio 2

Group Reading

11:00am EDT

A Poetry Reading with Nick Flynn & Beth Bachmann

Limited Capacity seats available

Nick Flynn and Beth Bachmann will read and discuss their new collections of poetry (My Feelings, Graywolf Press) and (Do Not Rise, Pitt Poetry Series). Raised in Scituate, MA, Flynn is the award-winning author of three prior books of poetry and three memoirs. His Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was made into the motion picture, Being Flynn, starring Robert De Niro. Beth Bachmann is author of the poetry collection Temper, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Recently featured in American Poetry Review’s poets in conversation piece discussing a poetics of the extreme, Flynn and Bachmann will read poems that mediate the space between extremes of violence and love.

Speakers

Beth Bachmann

Writer in Residence, Vanderbilt University

Beth Bachmann is the author of two books from The Pitt Poetry Series: Temper (2009), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Do Not Rise (2015), winner of the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Each fall, she serves as Writer in... Read More →

Nick Flynn

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
PEM Morse Auditorium

Headline Event

11:00am EDT

Getting It Done

Limited Capacity seats available

Consider the overworked adjunct professors. These heroes can teach nine classes at five schools in one semester, grade a stack of papers for their TR classes on the train to their MWFs, get dinner on the table, AND they have time to write all these great poems. How do they do it? Come hear some poems about writing even when you are really, really busy, and learn from some of the hardest working people in Po Biz. You’ll get some solace and community for your own exhaustion, and come away with some strategies for getting good writing done even when you’re working like a dog. We’ll read a couple poems, tell stories, and offer writing and time management techniques. Then we’ll open it up for plenty of lively Q&A.

Moderators

Jill McDonough

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Speakers

nicole terez dutton

Jennifer Jean

Program Manager, 24PearlStreet Online Writing Program at FAWC

Amy Lawless

Amy Lawless is the author of two books for poems, most recently My Dead (Octopus Books 2013). Her third book Broadax is also forthcoming from Octopus Books. An audio chapbook "from Broadax" is just out from Black Cake Records. Some poems have most recently appeared appeared in So... Read More →

Alyssa Mazzarella

Development Manager, GrubStreet

Alyssa Mazzarella helps ensure GrubStreet, one of the nation's leading creative writing centers, has the resources it needs to support writers of all types and talents. Prior to joining GrubStreet as the Development Manager, she taught and tutored writing at the University of Massachusetts... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
PEM East India Marine Hall

Panel Discussion

11:00am EDT

Gabriela Mistral- In Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature

Limited Capacity seats available

Gabriela Mistral received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. To this day she has been the only woman from Latin America to have received it. 2015 will commemorate the 70th anniversary of Mistral’s Nobel. In this panel we hope to address her legacy as a poet and human rights activist and explore why she continues to be unknown in many parts of Latin America and the United States today.

Speakers

Marjorie Agosin

MARJORIE AGOSIN is a Chilean-born Americanwriter. She is a prolific author: her published books,including those she has written as well as thoseshe has edited, number over eighty. Her two mostrecent books are both poetry collections, The Lightof Desire / La Luz del Deseo, translated... Read More →

Doris Atkinson

In 2006 South Hadley, MA, resident, Doris Atkinson, became the literary executor for the estate of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American Nobel Laureate in literature. Under her care over 17,000 documents including original manuscripts and hundreds of unpublished poems were... Read More →

Veronica Darer

Verónica Darer, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Education at Wellesley College. She specializes in Spanish language and culture courses and teaches classes on diversity in education and classroom interaction. She is co-author of a Spanish textbook, Reflejos. She... Read More →

Volunteers

Cindy Herrick

Abigail Warren

Associate Professor, Cambridge College

writingteaching

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Presentation

11:00am EDT

The Real Dirt: poetry of food, garden and farm

Limited Capacity seats available

We live in a time of constant movement, interconnectedness,urban excitement, of uprootedness. While there are many benefits to living in the so-called digital age, it is hard not to feel the loss of a psychic life that had a much deeper root system, planted in the local, furnished with shared cultural values. Poetry that grows out of the earth and has a sense of connectedness to "a" piece of ground, to "that" creek, to "the" maple on the knoll, can help to bring together these two worlds. We will explore the importance of poetry rooted in soil, garden, and farm through discussion illustrated with our own poems and those of others.

Speakers

Abbot Cutler

member, Slate Roof Press

Abbot Cutler lives at the end of a dirt road in Ashfield, MA with his wife Sarah Holbrook who is a photographer. He has three collections of poems from three different presses. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines including Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, and Blue Sofa Review... Read More →

Janet MacFadyen

Managing Editor, Slate Roof Press

Janet MacFadyen is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Adrift in the House of Rocks (photo-poetry collaboration from New Feral Press 2019) and Waiting to Be Born (Dos Madres 2017); with a new collection, State of Grass, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry 2023. Her work... Read More →

Dennis Pollock

Ed Rayher

Cindy Snow

member, Slate Roof Press

Cindy Snow’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Peace Review, Worcester Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart, and she is the recipient of writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Cill Rialaig. Slate Roof Press will publish... Read More →

Producers

Abbot Cutler

member, Slate Roof Press

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Presentation

11:00am EDT

Master Class in Reading Your Work Aloud

Limited Capacity seats available

In the literary world today, writers often reach a wider audience through readings than through publication. Yet most writers are not trained to read their works aloud. Even well-known writers may read with too little—or too much—expression. In this master class/workshop, participants discuss what makes a good reading and explore the wide range of successful reading styles. As many participants as we have time for present a poem or short passage of prose for feedback from the group, under the guidance of the instructor, and then works toward a livelier, more effective presentation, which often includes a deeper understanding of the work being read.

Speakers

Lloyd Schwartz

Frederick S. Troy Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
PEM Bartlett Gallery

Workshop

11:00am EDT

Our Mothers' Stories

Limited Capacity seats available

“(B)ehind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.” ― Mitch Albom, For One More Day  

Telling our mothers’ stories helps us to appreciate the bases for our own motivations, biases, and actions. In this workshop, we’ll explore our mothers' stories, from their perspectives and also from ours as children and as adults. We will examine the influences on them and their influences on us, to understand, and celebrate or transcend their legacies. We’ll read and discuss poems about mothers and participate in writing exercises geared toward mining this fertile ground for poetry.

Speakers

Marjorie Tesser

Editor in Chief, Mom Egg Review

Marjorie Tesser is the editor in chief of Mom Egg Review, author of poetry chapbooks THE IMPORTANT THING IS (Firewheel Chapbook Award), and The Magic Feather (Finishing Line), and co-editor of the anthologies Bowery Women and Estamos Aquí: Poems by Migrant Farmworkers (Bowery Books... Read More →

Volunteers

Amanda Hope

Poet & librarian

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Workshop

11:00am EDT

Writing Sound to Sound

Limited Capacity seats available

B.H. Fairchild’s speaker in “The Blue Buick: A Narrative” says

… an able catcher sets his feet
to avoid the extra step that makes him miss
the steal at second, a poet hears the syllable
before the word, a good machinist “feels” the cut
before he measures it.

The leaders will offer a series of prompts that position a poet to hear the next “syllable before the word.” During the workshop itself participants will begin responding to four of these prompts together so that they leave with four new poems started, each employing a different strategy for writing sound to sound. B.H. Fairchild’s speaker in “The Blue Buick: A Narrative” says

… an able catcher sets his feet
to avoid the extra step that makes him miss
the steal at second, a poet hears the syllable
before the word, a good machinist “feels” the cut
before he measures it.

The leaders will offer a series of prompts that position a poet to hear the next “syllable before the word.” During the workshop itself participants will begin responding to four of these prompts together so that they leave with four new poems started, each employing a different strategy for writing sound to sound. The workshop is limited to 15 participants.

Speakers

Moira Linehan

Producers

Mary Pinard

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Charter School Room 1

Workshop

11:00am EDT

Writing Truth & Beauty: Using Your Photos for Poetic Inspiration

Limited Capacity seats available

We’ve all had the experience of hearing the whispers of photographs that seem to have a deeper story to tell. Whether they’re treasured family snapshots, polished studio portraits or spontaneous cell phone images, certain pictures arrest our attention and prompt an emotional response we cannot immediately express – but we hope we’ll find a way. Writing poetry from photos allows us to express the truth of what we feel and haven’t said, and capture the beauty and deeper meaning of an image in words. We’ll let the images “speak” - writing poems that capture the feelings, personalities, relationships, rites of passage, cultural identity and family history evoked by photographs. When personally chosen photos are brought into a writing circle, powerful writing about family, community, and cross-cultural identity emerges. We’ll explore the photos as a warm-up to generating first drafts. Poets of any experience are welcome. Please bring photos to work from!

Speakers

Kelly DuMar

Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright, and workshop facilitator from Boston. She’s the author of three poetry chapbooks, and her poems and photos are published in many literary journals. She serves on the Board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and produces the Bi-Monthly... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Charter School Room 3

Workshop

11:00am EDT

Japanese Stab-Bound Notebooks

Learn this simple sewn bookbinding technique.

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 1:00pm EDT
PEM Create Space

Drop-in Activities

11:00am EDT

Poetry Carnival

Come one, come all to a carnival of poets! Sideshow attractions speak their stories, poetry themed games can be won, and each tent offers a new thrill. You, the illustrious audience, can meet the Ringmaster, marvel at the aerialist, and wander as you will through this immersive performance installation. Poets include Krysten Hill, Mariya Deykute, and Sam Cha. Music, surprise, characters, costumes, and poems await you at this once-in-a-lifetime event put together by The Theatre of Words and Music.

Speakers

Sam Cha

Sam Cha was born in Korea. He has an MFA from UMass Boston. He is the author of The Yellow Book (Pank, 2020) and the chapbook American Carnage (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2018). Other work has appeared in apt, Assay, Best New Poets, and Boston Review. He lives with his family in... Read More →

Mariya Deykute

co-founder, Boston Poetry & Jazz Salon

I am a Russian-born poet, writer, teacher & performing artist. I have taught courses to the homeless, undergraduates, prison inmates, elementary school kids, high school students & seniors throughout Massachusetts. I've performed my work at the Somerville Center for the Arts, the... Read More →

Joseph Gould

Krysten Hill

Peter Murphy

Peter Murphy is an aerialist, actor, and dancer with a BFA in Theatre performance from Salem State University who performs in the Salem and Boston areas. He has been seen in a number of theatrical productions over the past few years, most notably as Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream... Read More →

Producers

Shari Caplan

Shari Caplan is the author of “Advice from a Siren” (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her work appears in Zoetic Press, Drunk Monkeys, and Deluge and is forthcoming from Blue Lyra Review and The Rhylsing Anthology, a publication of Rhylsing Award nominees. A graduate of Lesley University’s... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 2:00pm EDT
Salem Common N Washington Square Salem, MA 01970

Presentation

11:00am EDT

Small Press and Literary Fair

Visit exhibitors at the Small Press and Literary Fair outside of the Peabody Essex Museum along the pedestrian mall. Featuring: Adastra Press • Bottle Rocket Press • Hedgerow Books • Human Error Publishing • Journal of the Month • Mock Orange Magazine • Perugia Press • Salamander • Slate Roof Press • Swamp Press • Tuesday: An Art Project • Tupelo Press • Zephyr Press (more coming soon)

Want to exhibit at the Small Press and Literary Fair? Reserve your table now. Questions? Email M.P. Carver at mp@masspoetry.org.

Saturday May 2, 2015 11:00am - 4:00pm EDT
Pedestrian Mall Outside PEM

Fair

12:15pm EDT

Capable Massachusetts: Poets with Disabilties

Limited Capacity seats available

Most of the time, people with disabilities are spoken about. At Capable Massachusetts, they will be speaking out. Slam poetry legend Ryk McIntrye and Oddball Magazine founder Jason Wright will be joined by rising stars Hannah Brown and Lewis Morris (a member of Flatline Poetry, winners of Best Poetry Group at the 2013 Mass Poetry Awards) for a generational artistic dialog on disabilities visible and invisible, and the ongoing struggle, 25 years after the ADA, to build a future where they are not barriers to opportunity. Moderated by poet and organizer Colin Killick of the Disability Policy Consortium.

Moderators

Colin Killick

Community Organizer, Disability Policy Consortium

Colin Killick is a poet and disability rights activist based in Somerville, MA, where he chairs the Commission for Persons with Disabilities. He previously produced Capable Somerville 2014, an event bringing together disability rights activists and disabled poets from across New England... Read More →

Speakers

Hannah Brown

Hannah Brown is a poet and spoken word artist from Boston. She has been writing for the majority of her life. After graduating from Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, she returned to the area and began performing regularly in 2014. Since then, she has been featured at Stone... Read More →

Ryk McIntyre

Ryk McIntyre has been a legendary presence on the New England poetry scene for decades. Which is to say, he is rarely photographed and not everyone is convinced he really exists. He has toured extensively around the continental United States and Canada, appearing on stages as varied... Read More →

Lewis Morris

Jason Wright

Editor/Founder, Oddball Magazine

Jason Wright is the editor and founder of Oddball Magazine. He has been published in the Somerville Scout, Fox Chase Review, Wilderness Review, Stones Throw, and Somerville Times. He was selected to read at Boston City Hall for his poem Strong as the Boston Skyline, Oddball Magazine... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
PEM Studio 1

Group Reading

12:15pm EDT

Tupelo Quarterly: A Reading

Limited Capacity seats available

Contributors and editors of Tupelo Quarterly come together to share some of their stunning work, and, as always, celebrate intellectual curiosity, artistic community, and creative risk. Join us — the gates are open! Moderated by Co-Managing Editors Sarah Russell and Kaylie Sweet, featured will be Associate Editors Jennifer Militello and Wesley Rothman, as well as TQ contributing poets Tina Cane, Crystal Condakes, and Jill McDonough.

Speakers

Tina Cane

Tina Cane currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, where she lives with her husband and their three children. She is the founder and director of Writers-in- the-Schools, RI and is an instructor with the writing community, Frequency Providence. Her poems and translations... Read More →

Crystal Condakes

Crystal Condakes is a Library Assistant at the Manchester Public Library and a speaker for Greater Boston PFLAG. Find her poems at Beloit Poetry Journal; Penn Review; Lily Poetry Journal; oddball magazine.

Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello is the author, most recently, of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (2016) and Body Thesaurus (2013), both from Tupelo Press. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets. She teaches... Read More →

Wesley Rothman

Wesley Rothman's poems and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Narrative Magazine, New England Review, Poet Lore, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl, and The White Review, among other venues. He has... Read More →

Producers

Marie Gauthier

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
PEM East India Marine Hall

Group Reading

12:15pm EDT

Warrior Writers Group Reading

Limited Capacity seats available

Warrior Writers is a veteran-focused national arts organization whose mission is to create a culture that articulates veterans' experiences, to provide a creative community for artistic expression through workshops and retreats, and to bear witness to the lived experiences of warriors. In this reading, area veterans whose work is featured in our anthologies will share some of their poetry.

Moderators

Eric Wasileski

Boston Facilitator, Warrior Writers

Eric Wasileski is a Persian Gulf Veteran of Operation Desert Fox, father, activist, preacher, ethicist and poet. Eric recently published his first book of poetry, Live Free (or Die), with Human Error Publishing. He is the coordinator of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of Veterans for... Read More →

Speakers

Tom Aikens

Tom Aikens is privileged to have been published in Warrior Writers' most recent anthologies, After Action Review (2011) and Warrior Writers (2014). He was an infantryman with 1st ID, and served as a team leader and squad leader on deployments to Kosovo (2002) and Iraq (2004-2005... Read More →

Michael Anthony

Warrior Writers

Michael Anthony was invited to read by Warrior Writers, a great group of veteran writers. He is honored to be a part of the 2015 Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Adam Graaf

Jon Turner

Jon Turner served from 2003-2007 as an infantryman with the marines, deploying in support of Operation Secure Tomorrow (2004- Haiti), and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2005 & 2006) where he was awarded a Purple Heart. He is currently working with the VA to facilitate writing workshops... Read More →

Producers

Rachel McNeill

Warrior Writers

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
PEM Studio 2

Group Reading

12:15pm EDT

From Zero to One: First Books and What We Wish We’d Known

Limited Capacity seats available

This event will be of special interest to writers submitting a manuscript or about to publish a first book. We’ll discuss the happy but often bewildering aftermath of acceptance: book design, publicity, the vulnerability of being newly published, post-publication contests, second and beyond books, and the importance of continuing to write after a manuscript has been assembled or even published. We’ll also talk about pre-publication editing, researching presses and contests, realistic publishing expectations, and dealing with a difficult publisher. Although the panel will focus on life after an acceptance, we will have handouts that address the business side of preparing a manuscript. Panelists include a publisher/editor and poets in various stages of their careers. Discussion will be audience driven – bring your questions!

Moderators

Karen Skolfield

Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress (W. W. Norton) won the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry, and she is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors... Read More →

Speakers

Amy Dryansky

Amy Dryansky has two poetry collections; Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry, and How I Got Lost So Close to Home (Alice James). She’s a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellow, and former poet laureate of Northampton, MA. You can... Read More →

Susan Kan

Director, Perugia Press

Perugia Press publishes the best new women poets in the country. Located in Northampton, MA, but with a far-reaching scope, Perugia gets more than 500 submissions to our annual manuscript contest. Winning poets are aged 28 to 80, come from California to the tip of Cape Cod, and write... Read More →

Sarah Sousa

Sarah Sousa is the author of the poetry collections See the Wolf (2018): Split the Crow (2015) and Church of Needles (2014) She also edited and transcribed The Diary of Esther Small, 1886 (2014) which won the New England Book Festival Award for Regional Literature. Her poems have... Read More →

Michelle Valois

Professor, Mount Wachusett Community College

In Michelle Valois' previous lives she owned the world's cutest beagle; lived in Sweden; and played the guitar - though not always at the same time. These days she lives in Florence, Massachusetts with her partner and their three children. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Hawthorne Library

Panel Discussion

12:15pm EDT

Poetry and American Empire

Limited Capacity seats available

Both poetry and political engagement have the power to make radical claims on us. In light of this, how do contemporary poets write to (or about) the manifestations of American influence, here and abroad? What ethical or aesthetic difficulties do they face? Members of this panel will share a few poems that take up these challenges and discuss the intersection between their politics and poetry.

Moderators

David Roderick

Co-director, Left Margin LIT

David Roderick is the author of two books of poems, BLUE COLONIAL and THE AMERICANS. From 2017-2019 he wrote the "State Lines" poetry column for The San Francisco Chronicle. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Amy Lowell Scholar, Roderick lives in Berkeley, California and co-directs... Read More →

Speakers

Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first... Read More →

Jill McDonough

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Oliver De La Paz

Associate Professor, College of the Holy Cross

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor ofseven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, andThe Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry... Read More →

Rachel Richardson

Contributing Editor, Memorious

Rachel Richardson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. She is the author of Copperhead (2011) and Hundred-Year Wave (forthcoming in 2016) both from Carnegie Mellon University... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Universalist Church

Panel Discussion

12:15pm EDT

The Poetry Workshop in Prison: MFA Students Reflect on Teaching at Baystate

Limited Capacity seats available

Three UMass Boston MFA students each discuss their experience leading a poetry workshop group at Baystate Correctional Facility. The discussion will span from the workshop's first year to its current year and include an insight into the purpose and intent of the program, materials and texts used, and overall responses to the workshop experience. Ally Dowds, the co-founder of the program and librarian at Baystate, will discuss the development and progress of the program over the past three years.

Speakers

Ally Dowds

Ally Dowds is currently employed as the head librarian at Bay State Correctional Center, a medium security, all male, state prison. Ally received her Master's in Library Science from Simmons College in 2010 and has worked in the MA Department of Corrections for 4 years. Three years... Read More →

Kate Glavin

MFA Candidate, UMass Boston

Kate Glavin received her M.A. in English Literature from the University of South Dakota in 2010. Since then she has been teaching creative writing, literature, and composition at a variety of institutions, including the prison classroom. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry... Read More →

Adam Graaf

Alyssa Mazzarella

Development Manager, GrubStreet

Producers

Kate Glavin

MFA Candidate, UMass Boston

Volunteers

Amanda Hope

Poet & librarian

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Panel Discussion

12:15pm EDT

Writing Race: Poets on the Complexity and Contradictions of Race in America

Limited Capacity seats available

In the "post-racial" Obama era, the nation remains racially polarized, as the tragedy and protests in Ferguson, Missouri amply demonstrate. How can a poet write truthfully about the complexity and contradictions of race in America? How can a poet balance the message in the poem with the demands of poetry? How can a poet speak on behalf of his or her community, and yet empathize with other communities? How can a poet channel anger into art, risking the alienation of the audience for the sake of honesty?

Martin Espada is often called “the Latino poet of his generation.” Poet John Murillo is the son of an African-American father and a Mexican mother. Richard Michelson is a Jewish poet who grew up in an African-American neighborhood. They will read from their work and discuss the risks and responsibilities of addressing race in poetry.

Speakers

Martín Espada

Martín Espada has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His forthcoming collection of poems is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and Alabanza (2003... Read More →

Richard Michelson

Richard Michelson is the author of More Money than God (Pitt Poetry Series, February 2015), Battles and Lullabies (U of Illinois), Tap Dancing for the Relatives (U of Florida), and two fine press collaborations with the artist Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. His many children’s... Read More →

John Murillo

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020). His honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards... Read More →

Producers

Richard Michelson

Volunteers

Cindy Herrick

Abigail Warren

Associate Professor, Cambridge College

writingteaching

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Panel Discussion

12:15pm EDT

The Poetics of Construction

Limited Capacity seats available

As contemporary life fragments around us, poetry becomes radical site of construction. Word by word, poets construct new realities from the material of language and thought. For poets of color, queer poets, working class poets, this work is not only radical, it is lifesaving.

We present Asian American poets engaging a range of poetics and evoking a wide scope of concerns. Taking as a starting point the Peabody Essex Museum’s collections, we will delve into what we construct and how—from the history of New England's involvement with the Asia trade and the construction of the idea of “Asia,” to an ecopoetics that questions the construction of the “natural” in relationship to race and technology, to meditations on the construction of interpersonal relationships and the body. We ask what it means to perform the act of construction today and how we deconstruct toward creating new, more useful constructions.

Speakers

Cathy Linh Che

Managing Director, Kundiman

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. She has received awards from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, Poets House, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower... Read More →

Chen Chen

Chen Chen is finishing his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University, where he is a University Fellow and a Poetry Editor of Salt Hill. New work is forthcoming in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Best American Poetry 2015, among others. Recent honors include being named a finalist in... Read More →

Ching-In Chen

University of Washington Bothell

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award... Read More →

Sally Wen Mao

Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Pick of Fall 2014. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and is forthcoming or published in Poetry... Read More →

Annie Won

Producers

Tamiko Beyer

Tamiko Beyer is the author of two poetry collections from Alice James Books, Last Days (forthcoming), We Come Elemental, and two chapbooks. Her work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, Hyphen, Dusie, and elsewhere... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
PEM Bartlett Gallery

Poetry with Visual Art

12:15pm EDT

Metaphor and the Art of the Fine Poetic Line

Limited Capacity seats available

Metaphor is most familiar as the literary device through which we describe one thing in terms of another, as when Shakespeare has Romeo say: "Juliet is the sun." But metaphor is much more than a literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. Metaphor is intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from economics and advertising to politics and business to science and psychology. Fresh metaphors are essential to writing fine lines, the rich, robust sentences that characterize the most compelling poetry. In this lively, interactive workshop, we will work with metaphor to create the kind of concise, vivid sentences that linger in readers' minds.

Speakers

James Geary

deputy curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism

James Geary is the Deputy Curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He is the author of two books about aphorisms, The New York Times bestseller The World in A Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism and Geary's Guide to The World's Great Aphorists. His... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Charter School Room 2

Workshop

12:15pm EDT

PoGens: Moving Poetry From the Margins to the Center

Limited Capacity seats available

Five professionals who are also poets will illustrate how their self-created poetry generation (PoGens) sessions have moved poetry from the margins of their busy lives to the center. A psychiatrist, nonprofit leader, development director, restaurant owner, and prep school teacher meet regularly to create poems, using a poetry generation process that strengthens writing skills and promotes the practice of craft. Panelists will briefly discuss how their commitment to PoGens has helped them keep poetry as a focus in the midst of demanding careers and contributed to traditional measures of success (publication and completion of an MFA), while strengthening each member’s awareness of the value of creation as a daring and life-affirming act. The workshop will move into a poetry generation session, including participants, providing practical advice for recreating the PoGens model.

Moderators

Grace Mattern

Author and Nonprofit Advisor

Grace Mattern’s has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including The Sun, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore and Yankee. She has received fellowships from the NH State Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center and has published two books of poetry. The Truth About Death... Read More →

Speakers

David Coursin

David Coursin worked for thirty-eight years as a physician, fitting in a range of creative interests around the edges of a full family and professional life. In 2011 he decided it was time for those interests to occupy the center of his day and retired from clinical practice. He has... Read More →

Anny Jones

Anny Jones teaches Creative Writing at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, though she grew up in Great Expectations territory in Kent. She is a poetry graduate of the MFA program at Pacific University where she was taught by Sandra Alcosser, David St. John and Kwame Dawes... Read More →

Hope Jordan

Director of Advancement, Manchester Community Health Center

Hope Jordan’s poems have appeared in such journals as Many Mountains Moving, Green Mountains Review and The 2010 Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire. She was the first official poetry slam master in New Hampshire, and coached the inaugural NH Poetry Slam Team in 2007. She has a dual... Read More →

Nancy Stewart

Nancy grew up in Concord, NH, lived in San Francisco for 6 years, and has spent the last 25 years running a sandwich shop in Concord, with her husband. Her poems have appeared in the literary journal, Bone and Flesh, and in the Seacoast Writers Association anthology, Currents V. She... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Charter School Room 4

Workshop

12:15pm EDT

Urban Nature Ecopoetry Workshop

Limited Capacity seats available

Based on an “Urban Nature Ecopoetry Workshop” series I created in Philadelphia, this workshop will bring participants outdoors, onto the streets, notebook in hand. In this generative, interactive workshop, we will explore and experiment with ecopoetry. We will discuss what it means to write nature poetry in our historical moment, in the midst of the climate crisis. We will look at poems from a variety of periods, ranging from the Romantic tradition to contemporary experimental poetry. Sources will include Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Earth Shattering: Ecopoems (among others). We will discuss how contemporary poets write from the environment, negotiate a sense of self in relation to the non-human world, and where the boundaries between “urban” and “nature” blur. Participants will be led on a poetry walking tour, with guided writing exercises, where we will use the local environment to spark poems.

Speakers

Hila Ratzabi

Director of Content and Programs, Ritualwell

Hila Ratzabi holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is director of content and programs at Ritualwell.org and lives in Oak Park, Illinois, with her partner and two children.

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:15pm - 1:15pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Workshop

12:30pm EDT

Big Apple Blues- The songs of Yusef Komunyakaa & Tomás Doncker

Limited Capacity seats available

A one of kind event! The poetry/lyrics of Yusef Komunyakaa set to the dynamic "Future-Blues" Groove of The Tomás Doncker Band-
Featuring Komunyakaa/Doncker compositions from their two critically acclaimed albums "The Mercy Suite" and the recently released "Big Apple Blues."

Saturday May 2, 2015 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT
PEM Morse Auditorium

Music and Poetry

1:00pm EDT

Word Silhouettes

Use a traditional portraiture technique to share what’s on your mind.

Saturday May 2, 2015 1:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
PEM Create Space

Drop-in Activities

2:00pm EDT

Cape Cod's Steeple Street Poets: Poems of Place, with an Open Mic

Limited Capacity seats available

Poetry of place is associated with, but not limited to the natural world. Poetry can be inspired by the workplace, a birthplace, an urban or rural landscape. The poetry of Philip Levine, Ted Kooser and B.H. Fairchild come to mind. Cape Cod has inspired poets such as Mary Oliver, Mark Doty, Brendan Galvin, Stanley Kunitz and Marge Piercy. The Steeple Street Poets, co-founders, James Kershner and Robin Smith-Johnson, and members, Judith Askew, Samm Carlton, Maeve Hitzenbuhler, Karen Klein, Laurel Kornhiser, Christina Laurie, Judith Partelow, Rich Youmans and Sheila Whitehouse will poems responding their connection with "place." Alice Kociemba will invite audience members to read a poem of place, as time allows.

Moderators

Alice Kociemba

Founding Director, Calliope—Poetry for Community

Speakers

J. Lorraine Brown

J. Lorraine Brown received a MA Grant and VSC Fellowship. She is a PNWA Zola Award winner. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser chose her poem for his nationwide newspaper column. Her chapbook, Skating on Bones, was a 2012 “Must-Read” Book of Poetry. She was included in Cape Cod’s Broadsides... Read More →

James Kershner

professor, Cape Cod Community College

James Kershner is the co-founder of Steeple Street Poets and a professor at Cape Cod Community College, where he teaches a variety of classes, including creative writing. He is the author of The Elements of News Writing, and the upcoming text, The Elements of Academic Writing.

Judith Partelow

My chapbooks are: A Woman's Heart and Carry Me Back, A Woman's Life in Poetry. I've been a featured reader at many venues including the Wellfleet Library, the Brewster Library, South Yarmouth Library, Provincetown Library, and will be at the Eastham Library in October 2021. I'm... Read More →

Robin Smith-Johnson

Robin Smith-Johnson teaches at Cape Cod Community College. She is the author of two books of poetry: Dream of the Antique Dealer’s Daughter (Word Poetry, 2013), and Gale Warnings (Finishing Line Press, 2016), as well as being a co-founder of the Steeple Street Poets. Robin lives... Read More →

Sheila Whitehouse

Rich Youmans

Rich Youmans's work has appeared in diverse publications, including Contemporary Haibun Online (where he currently serves as editor in chief), Cape Cod Poetry Review, the Cape Cod Times, and The Best Small Fictions 2020 (Sonder Press). He lives in North Falmouth with his wife, Alice... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Group Reading

2:00pm EDT

Coming Home: Four Veteran Poets on Returning

Limited Capacity seats available

Four veterans will each read from their own work and discuss coming home, what it meant for them, what it has meant in literature, and how they see us dealing with these returns now. They’ll consider what their service and their return has meant in their work, and combine conversation and poems to present their thoughts.

Moderators

Jill McDonough

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Speakers

Kevin Bowen

Born and raised in the West End of Boston, an old section of the city, demolished in 1960 to make way for new high rise condominium living, that experience, I have always been deeply effected by that experience. Along with my experience as a soldier in Vietnam, it has informed most... Read More →

Adam Graaf

George Kovach

Editor, CONSEQUENCE magazine

George Kovach is a poet and founding editor and publisher of CONSEQUENCE Magazine, the literary journal addressing the culture and consequences of war. He directs a series of writing workshops for war veterans at the Vet Center in Brockton, Massachusetts. Highly decorated for action... Read More →

Fred Marchant

Emeritus Professor of English, Suffolk University

Fred Marchant has authored five books of poetry, the most recent of which, Said Not Said, was named an Honored Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. He has edited Another World Instead: The Early Poetry of William Stafford, and, co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) works by several... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Library

Group Reading

2:00pm EDT

Rightin' Words Poetry Open Mic

Limited Capacity seats available

“Rightin’ Words” Poetry Open-Mic where the audience is the feature! Festival goers are encouraged to attend and share their own written pieces on stage in a friendly, inviting setting. First come, first serve signups, event starts at 1:30PM! Come express yourselves and share your writings!

Speakers

James Soule

Muriel Soule has discovered that she was actually he and also the only way to live is to leave a legacy. Therefore, he will leave one of words and tentacles.

Producers

CJ Rizzo

beatnik bohemian poet, artist, musician, bmxer, surfer, gypsypiratewitch, health inspector, paranormal investigator, fire spinner, filmmaker, photographer, tarot reader, minstrel street performer, merry prankster, shaman, philanthropist, Jedi, and human being from Salem, Massachusetts... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Jo' Freedom Café 196 Essex St., Salem MA

Open Mic

2:00pm EDT

Queer as Family, or, The F Word

Limited Capacity seats available

GLBT liberation has changed most of the “givens” that queer people once experienced as family members. With same-sex marriage legalized, more widespread acceptance by families of origin, and parenthood by various avenues (from artificial insemination to adoption) more common, what “family” can mean has changed dramatically.

How has this shifting landscape informed our identities as queer poets, and influenced the artistic choices we make in our work? Are our poems reactions to events unfolding around us, or have we been instrumental in inspiring today’s more tolerant attitudes?

Four poets (Christopher Hennessy, Gail Thomas, Pilar Quintana, and Steven Riel) who come from diverse backgrounds will read selections of their poetry while discussing how they employ poetic craft to illuminate family-related topic from a queer perspective.

Speakers

Christopher Hennessy

Christopher Hennessy is the author of three books, including two collections of interviews with gay writers, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press) and Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire (University of... Read More →

Pilar Quintana

poet, artist, musician, actor, Grey Court Poets

Pilar Quintana is a queer and genderqueer poet, currently working on a book of poems dealing with the roles that family, religion, and society play in our acceptance of gender and sexual identities. A member of the Grey Court Poets, Pilar's poems can be found in their anthology Songs... Read More →

Steven Riel

I am the author of one full-length book of poetry (Fellow Odd Fellow, published by Trio House Press) as well as three chapbooks, with the most recent, Postcard from P-town, selected as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize and published by Seven Kitchens Press. My... Read More →

Gail Thomas

Poet & Educator

Producers

Steven Riel

Volunteers

Amanda Hope

Poet & librarian

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Essex Room

Panel Discussion

2:00pm EDT

The Golden Shovel: A New Poetic Form that Honors Gwendolyn Brooks

Limited Capacity seats available

This interactive panel / performance will celebrate the continued influence of Gwendolyn Brooks through the introduction of the "Golden Shovel," a form created by MacArthur genius grant winner Terrance Hayes where he draws on Brooks' much-anthologized poem, “We Real Cool" and secretly encodes the words into his own poem. This new form encourages one to borrow in order to create and draws upon the genius of Ms. Brooks’ poetry.

We have received poems from National Poet Laureates from the U.S., England, Scotland and Canada; from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winners; and from a National Teen Poet Laureate. The session will cover the story behind the Golden Shovel Anthology: from Terrance Hayes’ poem, to Peter’s work with high school students, to Ravi and Patricia’s involvement. We will then discuss the form itself, look at some poems by Ms. Brooks and have time to write/share some Golden Shovel poems.

Speakers

Jericho Brown

Nick Flynn

Adrian Matejka

Gail Mazur

GAIL MAZUR is author of seven books of poems, including Forbidden City, Figures in a Landscape, Zeppo’s First Wife, winner of the Massachusetts book Prize and finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and They Can’t Take That Away from Me, finalist for the National Book Award. She... Read More →

Wesley Rothman

Lloyd Schwartz

Frederick S. Troy Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston

Ravi Shankar

Executive Director, Drunken Boat

Pushcart Prize winning poet Ravi Shankar founded Drunken Boat, co-edited W.W. Norton & Co.’s “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond,” and has published or forthcoming 10 books and chapbooks of poetry and translation, including the... Read More →

Producers

Ravi Shankar

Executive Director, Drunken Boat

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
PEM East India Marine Hall

Panel Discussion

2:00pm EDT

The Poetics of Loss: Writing About Private, Public and Historical Grief

Limited Capacity seats available

How do we write—and write well—about grief and loss? Can poetry of personal grief console family, friends or the poet him or herself? Can poetry of communal grief console a community or nation? How can poets contribute to the search for meaning at a time of personal or collective crisis? How should poets respond to the ceremonies of loss? Is it the poet's responsibility to articulate hope and the possibility of redemption in the face of loss?
A panel of poets will discuss the poetics of loss: public, private and historical grief. Anderson, a Vietnam veteran writes about that war and its relevance to the present. Michelson writes about everything from the Holocaust to his father's murder. Espada’s best-known work is the 9/11 poem “Alabanza,” but has recently been writing about the death of his own father. Moderator Freeman is the publisher of Paris Press.

Moderators

Jan Freeman

Director, Paris Press

Jan Freeman, Poet and Paris Press Director, lives in Ashfield, MAPeople should talk with Jan Freeman about poetry and publishing, creating a press, editing anthologies, and of course -- metaphor, poetry, and trauma.She is the author of Hyena and Simon Says, which was nominated for... Read More →

Speakers

Doug Anderson

Martín Espada

Richard Michelson

Producers

Richard Michelson

Volunteers

Cindy Herrick

Abigail Warren

Associate Professor, Cambridge College

writingteaching

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Sophia Room

Panel Discussion

2:00pm EDT

Conversations with the Sea: Poetry and Underwater Photographs

Limited Capacity seats available

Part of what I love about scuba diving is being immersed in a complex world not my own, a world with its own currents and relationships that I’m privileged to witness and commemorate through photography and poetry. This reading and underwater photo and video presentation weaves together images from all over the world, from the pygmy seahorse to the giant Pacific manta. The poems are inspired by the sea, its creatures, and my desire-based life.

Moderators

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Author of STEADY, MY GAZE (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of VILLANELLES (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2012). Her work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and RATTLE, among others. She is also a life coach and underwater photographer who has a thing for... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
PEM Bartlett Gallery

Performance

2:00pm EDT

Naugatuck River Review presents a workshop on Narrative Poetry

Limited Capacity seats available

Storytelling is the way humans impart their traditions and feelings through the generations. Poets and editors from Naugatuck River Review (a journal of narrative poetry) will present a workshop on writing our stories in compressed narrative, concentrating on the inclusion of a strong emotional core and the elements of story such as plot, setting and lyrical language.

Moderators

Lori Desrosiers

Publisher, Naugatuck River Review

Lori Desrosiers is a poet and the publisher of Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, and WORDPEACE.CO an online journal of social justice. She is the author of two books of poetry, "The Philosopher's Daughter" and "Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak" both from Salmon... Read More →

Speakers

Oonagh Doherty

Oonagh Doherty was born in Scotland, and grew up in both the United Kingdom and the United States. She is seriously interested in poetry about cultural clashes, connections between people who seem very different, globalization, desire, misunderstanding, love, and loss. She has published... Read More →

Howie Faerstein

Westfield State University

Howie Faerstein is the author of two chapbooks: Play a Song on the Drums, he said and Out of Order (Main Street Rag) and two full-length collections: Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn and Googootz and Other Poems, both published by Press 53. His poetry and reviews can be found in Great... Read More →

Em Jollie

Poet. Artist. Lover of the Living Earth. em jollie celebrates all genres of creative expression. In addition to writing poetry she is developing several prose pieces. Many of her hours are dedicated to gardening, crafting, making visual art, and playing traditional wood flutes. She... Read More →

Ellen LaFleche

Ellen LaFleche has published three chapbooks of poetry: Workers Rites (Providence Athenaeum); Ovarian (Dallas Poets Community Press); and Beatrice (Tiger's Eye Press.) She is a winner of the Philbrick Poetry Prize, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Charter School Room 1

Workshop

2:00pm EDT

Rhythm and Rhyme and a Jumpin' Good Time

Limited Capacity seats available

In this interactive workshop, families will sing, bop, drum, and collage to rhythm and rhyme, inspired by picture books written by husband and wife writing team Paul DuBois Jacobs and Jennifer Swender. Featured titles include: My Subway Ride, Fire Drill, and NASCAR 1, 2, 3's among others. Kids of all ages will have the chance to feel the beat, finish the rhyme, write their own poems, and make their own books using an assortment of materials. Book projects may include: accordion books, wish scrolls; necklace books, mini-books, etc.

Speakers

Paul DuBois Jacobs

Paul is a poet and writer of books for young readers. He has co-authored several pictures books with wife, Jennifer Swender, as well as four works with legendary folk musician and activist, Pete Seeger. Paul is also a long-time member of the Pioneer Valley's Group 18.

Jennifer Swender

A former elementary school teacher, Jennifer now writes books for young readers in addition to other curriculum-related projects. She has co-written seven pictures books with husband Paul DuBois Jacobs. Her first middle grade novel will be published with Crown Books in Fall 2016... Read More →

Producers

Jennifer Swender

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Universalist Church

Workshop

2:00pm EDT

Wild/Nature: Writing in the Natural World

Limited Capacity seats available

This is a generative writing workshop in which our reading and discussion of several so-called "nature" poems will provide examples and strategies that we can follow in our own creative writing. Come ready to experiment as we deepen our sensitivity toward the other-than-human-world by writing vivid, ecologically engaged texts that preserve some portion of the wild through their making, but also in the way this kind of writing invites attention and even advocacy, when read by others. (Bring your notebook.)

Speakers

Holly Wren Spaulding

Founder / Teacher, Poetry Forge

I'm a writer, reader, editor and teacher of poetry. I hosts writing workshops online and in person through Poetry Forge and Interlochen College of Creative Arts. At the heart of this work is my commitment to sharing useful practices and ideas that empower each one of us to thrive... Read More →

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
PEM Studio 2

Workshop

2:00pm EDT

Working Hard or Hardly Working: Poetry of Work

Limited Capacity seats available

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. –Robert Frost

Honest labor or soul-sucking drudgery? A way to nirvana, or something to plod through on one’s way to leisure? Office work, housework, school work, physical labor. Work that’s respected and work that’s denigrated. Day jobs or not. And of course, creative work. We will read poems and explore the world of work, from philosophy and attitudes to the observed particulars—the environment, language, ideas, hierarchies, and emotional tone of the worksite. Then, our work will begin—writing our own work poems.

Speakers

Marjorie Tesser

Editor in Chief, Mom Egg Review

Saturday May 2, 2015 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
PEM Studio 1

Workshop

3:15pm EDT

Flatline Poetry

Limited Capacity seats available

Since their formation in 2013, Flatline Poetry has taken the Boston poetry community by storm. The group won the 2013 Poetry Award for Best Poetry Group and was featured at Wheelock College’s 2014 Half Year Program. In addition, the poets of Flatline Poetry have performed, hosted open mics, or provided workshops at various venues across the East Coast, including: The Apollo Theater, AS220, Bridgewater State University, Busboys and Poets, The Bowery Poetry Club, Boys and Girls Clubs, The Cantab Lounge, Clark University, Columbia College, Emerson College, The Lizard Lounge, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, The Middle East, The Neuyorican, The New Hampshire State House, Northeastern University, The Oberon Theater, Simmons College, The Smithsonian, and Wheelock College.

In this dynamic performance, Lewis Morris, Kaleigh O'Keefe, and Lissa Piercy come together to combine both individual and group poems with music and vocals. This is not a show to be missed!

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Group Reading

3:15pm EDT

Group 18/Open Field Press: A Conversation in Poetry

Limited Capacity seats available

Group 18 is a Northampton poetry workshop founded by Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, and Jim Finnegan more than a quarter century ago. Some thirty-four poets have joined the group over the years, among them a recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize, several National Endowment for the Arts Fellows, and a Pulitzer finalist. Open Field Press, a cooperative endeavor of Group 18, has published an anthology of poetry by past and present members as well as individual collections. This reading offers selections from those books and other work, arranged as a composition in which the poems interweave, conversing with one another from reader to reader.

Speakers

Rosalyn Driscoll

Rosalyn Driscoll is a sculptor as well as a poet. Her recent book, Conjured from Dust, has photographs of her sculptures mingled with the poems.

Margaret Lloyd

Margaret Lloyd was born in Liverpool, England of Welsh parents and grew up in a Welsh community in central New York State. Forged Light (Open Field Press) is her third collection of poems. Alice James Books brought out her first collection, This Particular Earthly Scene. Plinth Books... Read More →

Henry Lyman

Henry Lyman’s work has appeared in The Nation, New England Watershed, The New York Times, Poetry, and other periodicals. Open Field Press published his collection The Land Has Its Say in April of this year. He edited Robert Francis’s new and uncollected poems Late Fire, Late Snow... Read More →

Missy-Marie Montgomery

Missy-Marie Montgomery is Professor of English and Humanities at Springfield College. Her work has appeared in over 25 literary magazines, including Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Poetry International, Rattle, Pearl, Cimarron Review, and Crab Orchard Review. Her chapbook... Read More →

Bill O'Connell

Bill O’Connell is the author of two collections of poems, Sakonnet Point and On The Map To Your Life. His poems have been published in The Sun, Green Mountains Review, Poetry East, and others. He teaches creative writing and literature at Greenfield Community College in Western... Read More →

Producers

Henry Lyman

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
Universalist Church

Group Reading

3:15pm EDT

Making It New

Limited Capacity seats available

Four poets, all of whom are faculty in the creative writing program at Suffolk University, will read from new work, both poems and translations. Each poet will aim to identify what he or she believes is new in the work that was read. It might be a new theme or a new form, or it could be a discovery about a given word or phrase or rhythm or figure of speech. Perhaps too the poem surprised the poet with something he or she had never thought of until the moment of composition. Overall the reading and discussion will offer a compendium of the various ways a poet might adapt and enact and even question Pound’s enduring injunction to “make it new.”

Moderators

Fred Marchant

Emeritus Professor of English, Suffolk University

Speakers

Jennifer Barber

Scholar in Residence/Editor, Suffolk/Salamander

Jennifer Barber teaches literature and creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, where she is also founding and current editor of the literary journal Salamander. Her poetry collections are Works on Paper, which received the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize (The Word Works, 2106), and... Read More →

David Ferry

George Kalogeris

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
PEM Bartlett Gallery

Group Reading

3:15pm EDT

Aloha Winter, Aloha Spring

In extreme winters like this one, what is there to do but cuddle up under thick blankets and write? (Post shoveling, that is.) In this reading, we will wave goodbye to winter and hello to spring by reading the winter- or spring-themed poems we've written during this thick season of snow. Bring one poem on winter or spring (three minutes or less) to read to the Mass Poetry audience. Sign up will take place at the event, first-come first-served. We’ll host as many poems as time will allow.

Producers

Laurin Macios

Program Director, Mass Poetry

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
PEM East India Marine Hall

Group Reading Open Mic

3:15pm EDT

The State of Poetry

Limited Capacity seats available

A diverse panel of poets will engage in a free flowing discussion about the state of poetry today: who gets published (and who doesn’t), the impact of new technologies, trends in craft, and poets and poetry’s connection to the events and to the social context of our times. Hosted by Jennifer Jean.

Speakers

Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. In 2012, the New York Times called Burt “one of the most influential poetry critics of his generation.” He grew up around Washington, DC and earned a BA from Harvard and PhD from Yale. Burt has published three collections... Read More →

Denise Duhamel

Martin Farawell

Director, Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Poet and playwright Martin Jude Farawell directs the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and Poetry Program. Martin arrived at the Dodge Foundation with two decades of experience coordinating poetry reading series, teaching poetry and creative writing, and working in all areas of performance... Read More →

Regie Gibson

Regie Gibson is a poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator. Gibson and his work appear in the film Love Jones, based largely on events in his life. In 1999 he performed for the award-winning Traffic Series at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater where he adapted... Read More →

Jennifer Jean

Program Manager, 24PearlStreet Online Writing Program at FAWC

Producers

Jennifer Jean

Program Manager, 24PearlStreet Online Writing Program at FAWC

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
PEM Morse Auditorium

Panel Discussion

3:15pm EDT

What Good Can A Poet Do? Raising Voices Within Our Communities

Limited Capacity seats available

Like many developing communities, New Bedford, MA has a rich history, but took an economic downturn. Thankfully, poets raise voices within those that feel they have none. The artists of the community have inspired its renaissance by reshaping the city’s nightlife and offering writing programs for youth. This forum will discuss the different ways poets, regardless of style or age, can contribute to revitalizing a community. Session will include a brief reading and open discussion of different ways to introduce the power of poetry to your own neighborhood.

Moderators

Amanda DeGrace

Speakers

Erik Andrade

Creative Director, La Soul Renaissance

Erik Andrade is a Cape Verdean and Irish American artist living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Erik is an award winning spoken word poet, ( 2012 SouthCoast Poet of Year, 2014 SouthCoast Emerging Leader Nominee, 2014 Flipside Radio Best Poet Nominee, 2015 3rd Place Lizard Lounge King... Read More →

Iva Brito

Patricia Gomes

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
PEM Studio 1

Panel Discussion

3:15pm EDT

The Origin of Words: Immersive Music & Poetry Performance

Limited Capacity seats available

"The Origin of Words" is an original performance that brings together poetry & instrument improvisations from Boston-based performing artist Mariya Deykute and world-class jazz musician Leo Loginov-Katz. Exploring the origin of expression and the creation of personal myth, the performance is unique in its involvement of the audience (on a volunteer basis) and in the improvised nature of the music and soundscape created by Leo Loginov-Katz.

Speakers

Mariya Deykute

co-founder, Boston Poetry & Jazz Salon

Saturday May 2, 2015 3:15pm - 4:15pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 2nd floor

Performance

7:30pm EDT

Rita Dove and Richard Blanco Headline Event

Limited Capacity seats available

Join us for this extraordinary poetry reading with acclaimed poets Rita Dove and Richard Blanco. This event is not to be missed!

Speakers

Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco is the author of the memoirs The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey; the poetry chapbooks One Today and Boston Strong; and the poetry collections Looking for the Gulf Motel, Directions to the Beach of... Read More →

Rita Dove

Rita Dove is a former U.S. Poet Laureate (1993-1995) and recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Thomas and Beulah. The author of nine poetry collections, most recently Sonata Mulattica (2009) and American Smooth (2004), as well as a collection of short stories, a... Read More →

Producers

Laurin Macios

Saturday May 2, 2015 7:30pm - 8:30pm EDT
Universalist Church

Headline Event

9:45pm EDT

Rachel Wiley, Regie Gibson Saturday Late-night Event

Limited Capacity seats available

Join Rachel Wiley and Regie Gibson as they give a late-night performance you won’t want to miss.

Speakers

Regie Gibson

Rachel Wiley

Producers

Laurin Macios

Saturday May 2, 2015 9:45pm - 11:00pm EDT
Finz 76 Wharf St, Salem, MA 01970

Headline Event

10:00am EDT

Mad-Lib Muse

Loosen up your imagination using a childhood game as a creative prompt. Get the words flowing with fillin-the-blank templates.

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:00am - 4:00pm EDT
PEM Atrium

Drop-in Activities

10:00am EDT

Paint Chip Poetry

Choose a swatch and let the colors inspire you with words and images.

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:00am - 4:00pm EDT
PEM Atrium

Drop-in Activities

10:15am EDT

Comstock Review 30th Anniversary - Celebrating Massachusetts Poets

Limited Capacity seats available

For 30 years, the Comstock Review has been publishing and has awarding more than $30,000 in our contest prizes. An independent journal with an all-volunteer staff of poets who love the craft and those who write in the genre, CR has featured many MA poets throughout the years. In celebration of three decades in print and the marvelous contributors from across the state who have graced our pages, we gather to hear voices that we admire so greatly. Hosted by Georgia A. Popoff, CR senior editor

Speakers

Wandajune Bishop-Towle

Grey Held

Grey Held has spent 25 years in the corporate world, managing and mentoring teams and coordinating projects. He is a recipient of a NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing. Two books of his poetry have been published: Two-Star General (Brick Road Poetry Press in 2012) and Spilled Milk... Read More →

Paul Hostovsky

Brionne Janae

Brionne Janae is a California native, poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botoloph Emering Artist award, a Hedgebrook and Vermont Studio Center Fellowship Alumni and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry and prose have been published in... Read More →

Mary Ellen Redmond

Tara Skurtu

Poet, Teacher, Translator, Boston University Prison Education Program

Allen West

Producers

Georgia Popoff

Georgia A. Popoff, is an educator, arts-in-education specialist, Comstock Review senior editor, Downtown Writers Center Workshops Coordinator and faculty member with two poetry collections and coauthor of a book for teachers on poetry in K-12 classrooms. Her fourth book is forthcoming... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:15am - 11:15am EDT
Hawthorne Library

Group Reading

10:15am EDT

Emerging Jewish Poets

Limited Capacity seats available

Jewish people are called the “people of the book,” but what does it mean to be a contemporary Jewish poet? What are the parameters of a Jewish poem? In this reading, four emerging Jewish poets and spoken-word artists begin to answer these questions. Exploring a diverse array of subjects, from a queering of Queen Esther to superheroes and Paraguayan tarot. Poets will share and discuss their works that celebrate explicitly and implicitly the humor, subversion, memory, and intertextuality quintessential to Jewish culture and tradition. After the reading, poets invite the audience to join the conversation and share their own stories.

Speakers

Jason Henry Simon Bierenbaum

E. Lev Friedland

Emily Jaeger

Poet, Editor, Window Cat Press

LynleyShimat Lys

LynleyShimat Lys just moved back to New York after five years in Jerusalem, studying Middle Eastern Studies (Palestinian Poetry, Arabic, Hebrew, Pahlavi) at Hebrew University. She works in academic publishing in Non-English article abstracting and indexing. She is studying in the... Read More →

Producers

Emily Jaeger

Poet, Editor, Window Cat Press

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:15am - 11:15am EDT
PEM Studio 1

Group Reading

10:15am EDT

The Poetry of Loss

Limited Capacity seats available

The poet Gregory Orr has said "every encounter with disorder of any sort that results in a poem is a successful encounter in the most basic sense...namely, the poet survived." Loss--expected and unexpected--is universal. Lyric poetry lends itself to expressing the unique emotion, meaning, and impact of loss, as well as its common human and social dimensions. In this group reading, four Massachusetts poets--Myles Gordon, Miriam Greenspan, Becky Kennedy, and Ellen Steinbaum--who have survived profound personal losses including caring for a dying mother, the illness and death of a spouse, sudden death of a child, and the ravages of addiction in the family, will read from their work on a subject that touches all of us. Participate in the power of poetry to sustain both the poet and the audience in facing grievous losses and celebrating life. There will be time for questions and discussion following the readings.

Moderators

Miriam Greenspan

Miriam Greenspan is a psychotherapist and writer whose work includes the bestseller Healing Through the Dark Emotions, as well as numerous magazine essays of political/cultural commentary. The Heroin Addict’s Mother, (Atmosphere Press, 2021) a memoir that bears witness to the ravages... Read More →

Speakers

Myles Gordon

Myles Gordon's book, Inside The Splintered Wood (Tebot Bach) was named a "Must read" 2014 by the Massachusetts Center For The Book. He is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Evening Street Press Chapbook Competition, and an honorable mention for the AWP Intro Award. His... Read More →

Becky Kennedy

Becky Kennedy received her BA in English and her PhD in linguistics from Harvard University; she lives with her family in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. She teaches courses in language structure, language acquisition, literature, and creative writing at Lasell College, where she chairs... Read More →

Ellen Steinbaum

Poet, Journalist, Blogger

Ellen Steinbaum is the author of three poetry collections, "Afterwords," "Container Gardening," and "Brightness Falls." Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is included in Garrison Keillor’s “Good Poems, American Places” and “The Widows’ Handbook... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:15am - 11:15am EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Group Reading

10:15am EDT

Grief & Poetry: Crafting Loss

Limited Capacity seats available

Stanley Kunitz said, “So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn't say as much as in what it does say.” Yet from Edgar Allen Poe’s chanted laments to Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie on the influenza epidemic to Mark Doty’s My Alexandria on AIDS, people turn to poetry to name the unnamable—grief, loss, sorrow. How do poems bring, if not solace or resolution, then understanding to the unknowable? What in the “secret language” of poetry (Kunitz) speaks to the language of grief? And what in the urge to write makes the vessel of poetry able to contain the emotions—successfully or unsuccessfully? Panelists will present and discuss poems, focusing on craft, and look to the audience to contribute their understanding.

Speakers

Patrick Donnelly

Director, Poetry Seminar, The Frost Place

Patrick Donnelly’s books are The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012), a 2013 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In 2013 he received a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program... Read More →

Danielle Georges

Professor, Lesley University

Danielle Legros Georges is the former Poet Laureate of Boston; a professor of creative writing at Lesley University; the creative editor of six salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature; and a contributing editor to the literary magazines Salamander and Consequence... Read More →

Frannie Lindsay

Anna M. Warrock

Slate Roof Press

Anna M. Warrock’s publications include From the Other Room, Slate Roof Press Chapbook Award winner, and the chapbooks Horizon and Smoke and Stone. Besides appearing in Visual Verse, Conduit, Harvard Review, The Sun, The Madison Review, Poiesis, and other journals, her work is anthologized... Read More →

Producers

Anna M. Warrock

Slate Roof Press

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:15am - 11:15am EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Panel Discussion

10:15am EDT

Naming Your Roots: Seeds for Multi-Lingual, Multicultural Narrative Poems

Limited Capacity seats available

From the photographs we carry to the stories of our names, participants in this engaging workshop will be guided to write down and to share aloud "socs" (streams-of-consciousness), seeds for new poems, which share the presence or erasure of their own cultural, racial, ethnic and linguistic heritages.Participants will also further develop their own appreciation of the power of code-switching, namely, incorporating other languages or dialects into their poems. Limited to 15 workshop members (18+), from emerging to experienced.

Speakers

María Luisa Arroyo

multilingual Boricua poet & educator

Multilingual Boricua poet and educator María Luisa Arroyo was educated at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA) and Harvard (ABD) in German, her third language. Her poetry collections include Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (2008) and Destierro Means More than Exile (2018). For 20+ years... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 10:15am - 11:15am EDT
PEM Studio 2

Workshop

11:00am EDT

Common Threads

Limited Capacity seats available

Rhina P. Espaillat, John Hodgen, Fred Marchant, and Alice Kociemba read and discuss the poems in Common Threads 2015.

Speakers

Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. After Espaillat’s great-uncle opposed the regime, her family was exiled to the United States and settled in New York City. She began writing poetry as a young girl—in Spanish and then... Read More →

John Hodgen

John Hodgen has won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) and the 2008 Chad Walsh Prize in Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal. He lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and teaches at Assumption College in Worcester.

Fred Marchant

Emeritus Professor of English, Suffolk University

Producers

Alice Kociemba

Founding Director, Calliope—Poetry for Community

CommonThreads2015pdf pdf

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:00am - 12:15pm EDT
PEM Bartlett Gallery

Panel Discussion

11:30am EDT

Poems of Love and War

Limited Capacity seats available

Poets Cathy Linh Che, Laren McClung and Bruce Weigl will read poems that reckon with love and war across generations.

Speakers

Cathy Linh Che

Managing Director, Kundiman

Laren McClung

Laren McClung is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press). She received her MFA from New York University. Her work has appeared in reviews including Harvard Review; The Massachusetts Review; Painted Bride Quarterly; Copper Nickel; Cerise Press; The American... Read More →

Bruce Weigl

Bruce Weigl’s most recent poetry collection The Abundance of Nothing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2013. Renowned translator and the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Song of Napalm and the best-selling memoir The Circle of Hanh, Weigl is past... Read More →

Producers

Laren McClung

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
Hawthorne Library

Group Reading

11:30am EDT

Remembering/Unburying Malcolm Miller

Limited Capacity seats available

We celebrate the writing of 83-year-old Salem poet Malcolm Miller, who died last September. An iconoclast and occasional curmudgeon, Miller had an original voice, sometimes witty, sometimes biting (sometimes lusty), that poked fun at hypocrisy and piety and that reveled in staying alive to life. After publishing three “legitimate” collections between 1969 and 1978, he turned away from the poetry establishment and self-published fifty-eight more books , mailing these to libraries, acquaintances ,and strangers, inviting contributions of $5. His readers and fans gather here in the hope of keeping the poems of Malcolm Miller alive and exposed to a wider audience.

Moderators

Rod Kessler

Professor Emeritus, Salem State University

In retirement Rod Kessler has been editing the poetry and researching the life of Salem poet Malcolm Miller (1930-2014).

Speakers

Maile Black

Maile Black does what she is told.

M.P. Carver

M.P. Carver is a poet from Salem, MA

Linda Flaherty Haltmaier

Linda Flaherty Haltmaier is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Andover, MA. Her latest collection, Rolling up the Sky, won the Homebound Publication Poetry Prize. She eats way too much chocolate on a daily basis and would love to find a writing group that laughs and drinks in equal m... Read More →

Pamela Harris

Pamela Harris grew up in Danvers and lives in New York City. She is Malcolm Miller's niece. Also a writer, she has created a half-hour comedy for Howard Stern Productions; was a staff writer for 'Life on the Line,' a one-hour drama on the Oxygen Network; has had two features optioned... Read More →

Claire Keyes

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Group Reading

11:30am EDT

Writing Across Cultures

Limited Capacity seats available

With today’s continued growth in multiculturalism and the resistance to diversity by many groups, poets in the United States have an important role to play to advance social change by writing about other cultures in ways that promote shared experiences and equality. In this panel, we will discuss how our multicultural experiences can enter and inform our poetry, be it through the incorporation of other languages, the settings and themes we choose to explore in our work, or the translations of works into English or from English into other languages. Our goal is to start a conversation with other writers that we hope will carry beyond the conference.

Speakers

Sara Rivera

Poet & Fiction Writer

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban/Peruvian writer, artist, educator, and translator from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her poetry and speculative fiction have appeared in The Loft Anthology, Origins Journal, DIALOGIST, Storyscape Journal, Circuits & Slippers, The Green Mountains Review, in... Read More →

Tara Skurtu

Poet, Teacher, Translator, Boston University Prison Education Program

Patrick Sylvain

Patrick Sylvain is a poet, writer, translator, photographer, and academic. He is a faculty at Brown University’s Center for Language Studies. Sylvain has taught as a lecturer at Harvard, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Tufts University. Additionally, Sylvain was also... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Panel Discussion

11:30am EDT

Heartbreak in the Work of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath

Limited Capacity seats available

New work on the Sexton and Plath archives reveal how much heartbreak played a part in the work, as well as the lives, of these gifted poets. I’ll be sharing some of this new research. Then I’ll look closely at the poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and talk about how these remarkable poets transformed heartbreak into art. Author of “With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Kunitz and Others,” I knew both Sexton and Plath personally, saw drafts of their poems as they were writing them, and was able to observe the process by which they shaped their pain into art. Using handouts, I will talk about some of the factors that might shape art, in this case poetry.

Speakers

Kathleen Spivack

Writer/teacher.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of "Unspeakable Things," published by A.Knopf, 2016. Her last book was "With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz and Others" (University Press of New England, 2012.) She’s published eight other... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
PEM Morse Auditorium

Presentation

11:30am EDT

Endings: When is Enough?

Limited Capacity seats available

Endings: When is Enough?
That’s all, folks! If only it were that easy. But the end of a poem needs to resonate with the entire poem, not just wrap it up. It can comment on the poem or lift it to a new meaning. It can leave the reader or listener laughing or suddenly somber. How do you write an ending that peels out of the driveway like a doomed lover? That drifts down like fog or gives a final firecracker pop? In this workshop we will look at different kinds of endings and how they make the meaning and mood of the poem. You will learn prompts that will help you revise endings. Bring one of your poems to read and we will workshop it just for the ending. The End.

Speakers

Dawn Paul

Writing/Interdisciplinary Faculty, Montserrat College of Art

Dawn Paul is the author of the novel The Country of Loneliness and What We Still Don’t Know, poems on the life and work of scientist Carl Linnaeus. She has also published poetry, fiction and science/nature articles in a variety of journals and magazines, including Orion, Comstock... Read More →

Cindy Veach

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ Her poems have appeared in the... Read More →

Producers

Dawn Paul

Writing/Interdisciplinary Faculty, Montserrat College of Art

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
PEM Studio 2

Workshop

11:30am EDT

Found Narratives: Poetry from Art Pairings

Limited Capacity seats available

Artworks speak to poets--but do these works speak to each other as well? How does the proximity of one work to another inspire new ideas and connections that one piece alone does not? In this workshop, we will explore unusual pairings in current exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and discuss the ways curators, like poets, use juxtaposition to evoke surprise and curiosity. We will also practice close-looking strategies which then inform our poetry writing practice. Writers and art-lovers of all levels of experience welcome: just bring your eyes and your imagination, (and possibly your favorite writing implement), we'll provide the rest!

Speakers

Margaret (Meg) Winikates

Director of Engagement, New England Museum Association

Margaret Winikates is a writer and museum professional from Boston and Sharon, MA. She writes poetry and fiction, as well as being the co-editor of New England Museums Now. Meg is thrilled and honored to be one of the poets selected for the Ekphrastic Poetry Gallery at this year's... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
PEM Studio 1

Workshop

1:00pm EDT

Playing All the Words: On the Intersections of Poetry and Music

Limited Capacity seats available

Five contemporary poets riff from music—or trouble its power—in poems about music and the treatment of Parkinson’s disease; an opera singer’s “lost” voice and rogue conductor; bad moods, lyric modes, and neuro-plasticity; and in postmodern remixes of the traditional love poem. From the Yvor Winters’ “quintet” to Kore Press, from the pages of the New Yorker to Smartish Pace, five accomplished poets (spanning four generations) share poems and discuss what it means to be a poet-singer now.

Speakers

John Matthias

Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

John Matthias has published some thirty books of poetry, translation, collaboration, literary criticism, memoir, and fiction. He taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame, where he directed both MFAs and PhDs. He was part of the same generation of Stanford University grad... Read More →

Daniel Evans Pritchard

Editor / Poet / Critic, The Critical Flame

Daniel is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the founding editor of The Critical Flame (criticalflame.org), an online journal of literary nonfiction, criticism, and interviews. Daniel advises AGNI on digital strategy and serves on the board at Salamander Magazine. His work has... Read More →

Heather Treseler

Associate Professor, Worcester State University

Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre's international chapbook prize and the Jean Pedrick chapbook prize in 2020. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, JAMA, and The American Scholar, among... Read More →

Anthony Walton

Bowdoin College

Anthony Walton is the author of "Mississippi: An American Journey" and the editor, with Michael S. Harper of "The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry" and "Every Shut-Eye Ain't Asleep: African Poetry Since World War II." His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review... Read More →

Andi Werblin

Andrea Werblin is the author of two book of poems, Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (Lost Horse Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in BOOG Reader, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, The Massachusetts Review, and Smartish Pace... Read More →

Producers

Heather Treseler

Associate Professor, Worcester State University

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
PEM Studio 2

Group Reading

1:00pm EDT

Poems for the 99 Percent

Limited Capacity seats available

Poems for the 99 Percent is a reading and discussion about the way poetry can matter in a democracy. It’s a cliché that poets are not wealthy, but it’s also true that poetry itself can seem elite or foreboding. This panel and reading will discuss the way poetry can contribute to discussion of democracy, social justice, and economic inequality.

Moderators

Jonathan Silverman

Jonathan Silverman is working on manuscripts about horse racing, Norway, and Johnny Cash. And cows.

Speakers

Martha Collins

Joan Houlihan

Fred Marchant

Emeritus Professor of English, Suffolk University

Susan Richmond

Director of the Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize, Robert Creeley Foundation

Susan Edwards Richmond has four published poetry collections: Increase (FootHills Publishing), Birding in Winter (Finishing Line Press), and Purgatory Chasm and Boto(both from Adastra Press). Her work has appeared in Blueline, The Iowa Review, Green Mountains Review, and Poetry East... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Old Town Hall, 1st floor

Group Reading

1:00pm EDT

Salamander's New Voices

Limited Capacity seats available

Join Salamander Magazine for a reading by some of its most recent contributors: Ciaran Berry, Leslie McGrath, and Maggie Dietz. This group comes together to celebrate a magazine whose mission, after two decades, remains singular and dynamic: “to publish a generation of writers reaching artistic maturity and deserving of a wider audience alongside new work by established writers.” Each of these readers, a serious practitioner of the craft, adds something to the developing creative conversation between Salamander contributors, past and present.

Speakers

Ciaran Berry

Assistant Professor, Director of Creative Writing, Trinity College

Ciaran Berry’s most recent book is The Dead Zoo. His poems have been widely published in American and Irish journals and selected for Best New Poets 2006 and Best American Poetry 2008. The Sphere of Birds, won the Crab Orchard Series Award of Southern Illinois University Press... Read More →

Maggie Dietz

Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Maggie Dietz’s is the author of the newly released That Kind of Happy and Perennial Fall, which won New Hampshire’s Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry in 2007 (both from The University of Chicago Press). The former director of the Favorite Poem Project, Dietz is... Read More →

Leslie McGrath

Poet and literary interviewer, Central CT State University

Leslie McGrath is a poet and literary interviewer. She is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (2009), a poetry collection, and two chapbooks, Toward Anguish (2007) and By the Windpipe (2014). McGrath's latest book is a satiric novella in verse, Out From the Pleiades (Jaded... Read More →

Producers

Jennifer Barber

Scholar in Residence/Editor, Suffolk/Salamander

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Library

Group Reading

1:00pm EDT

Rita Dove

Limited Capacity seats available

Don’t miss festival headliner Rita Dove, who will read and discuss her poems in a Q&A.

Speakers

Rita Dove

Producers

Laurin Macios

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
PEM East India Marine Hall

Headline Event

1:00pm EDT

From Sappho to Sapphire: Woman Poets on the sphere of Woman Poets.

Limited Capacity seats available

From Sappho to Sapphire: Woman Poets on the sphere of Woman Poets.
The long deafening silence of women in poetry ended with the advent of Betty Friedan’s militant The Feminist Mystique (1963) beginning the second wave of feminism. By the 1970’s Universities had Take Back the Night marches, Feminist Study departments, Women’s Centers and Rape Crisis Lines. How did this academic cultural landscape change the face of women’s poetry? Female poets will share their influences, lived experiences, and poetry.

Moderators

Elisabeth Weiss

Salem State University

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University in Salem, MA. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s worked in the editorial department at Harper & Row in New York and has an MFA from The University... Read More →

Speakers

Frannie Lindsay

Donna French McArdle

Donna French McArdle’s poems have appeared in the anthology Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community, in several literary journals including Wilderness House Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, and Sixfold (Winter 2015 and 2019). With a grant... Read More →

Jo Pitkin

Poet and Educational Writer, Pear Tree Hill Editorial Services

I received a BA from Kirkland College, a progressive women's college that pioneered the creative writing undergraduate degree, and an MFA in poetry from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. I am the author of a chapbook and four full-length volumes of poetry—Cradle of... Read More →

Kate Rushin

Kate Rushin is the author of The Black Back-Ups (Firebrand Books). Her “The Bridge Poem” appears in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a ground-breaking feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Recipient of the Rose Low... Read More →

Kathleen Spivack

Writer/teacher.

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
PEM Bartlett Gallery

Panel Discussion

1:00pm EDT

Shakespeare's *itches: The Women Talk Back (A Poetry Musical)

Limited Capacity seats available

Shakespeare’s *itches: The Women Talk Back is a poetry musical from the points of view of Shakespeare’s female characters and their contemporary counterparts, including The Dark Lady of the Sonnets teasing Will; Desdemona in a duet with Nicole Brown Simpson; Kate, the shrew, as a contemporary bartender singing a drinking song; Gertrude taunting Ophelia; and Cordelia rapping on the Mountebank William Show. In turns rollicking and moving, bawdy and philosophical, Shakespeare’s *itches gives voice to often victimized characters, and, through poetry and song, restores their power. Written and performed by Emmy nominated poet and troubadour Susanna Rich.

Speakers

Susanna Rich

Founding Producer and Principal Performer, Wild Nights Productions, LLC

Poet and songwriter, Susanna Rich is an Emmy Award nominee and a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing. Founding producer and principal performer of Wild Nights Productions, LLC, Susanna's repertoire includes the new poetry musical Shakespeare's *itches: The Women Talk Back; ashes... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
PEM Morse Auditorium

Performance

1:00pm EDT

Yes You Can: The Business of Writing

Limited Capacity seats available

You hone your poem into a masterpiece, and now it’s ready to send out to the world.

• Where will you send it? How do you select the best places to present your work from thousands of literary markets?
• What do you need to know about copyright?
• How do you write a bio? A cover letter?
• What are the best tools to manage submissions?
• What about literary contests?
• How do you market yourself as a writer?

Through discussion, examples, and handouts to take home, participants in this workshop will gain necessary knowledge and skills to manage their written work and more effectively navigate the publishing world. Time will also be spent on the value of marketing your work, not by hiring a publicist, but by being an engaged member of the writing community and using standard publicity tools like print and social media.

Speakers

Valerie Lawson

Editor/Publisher, Resolute Bear Press

Valerie Lawson’s work has been published in Main Street Rag, BigCityLit, About Place Journal, The Catch, and Ibbetson Street. Lawson’s first book, Dog Watch, was released in 2007. Her work has won awards for Best Narrative Poem and Spoken Word at the Cambridge Poetry Awards and... Read More →

Sunday May 3, 2015 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Hawthorne Pickman Room

Workshop

2:30pm EDT

Jorie Graham and Stephen Burt Sunday afternoon event

Limited Capacity seats available

Join us for our closing reading with Jorie Graham and Stephen Burt. Opening for them are the two winners of the Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize, Nicole Blackwood and Sequoia LeBreux.

Speakers

Nicole Blackwood

Nicole Blackwood is a winner of the 2015 Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize. A recent winner of the Arisia Writing Award and a Writer's Digest Short Story winner, Nicole is a junior at Newburyport High School. With assistance from her Creative Writing teacher, Deborah Szabo, she... Read More →

Stephen Burt

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, Place, which won the Forward Prize in 2012, and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer prize for Poetry. Her other poetry... Read More →

Sequoia LeBreux

Sequoia LeBreux is a winner of the 2015 Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize. A junior at Mohawk Trail Regional High School in Shelburne Falls, Sequoia is an activist, feminist, artist, and poet. She aspires to expand minds and in turn expand her own through experiencing new art and... Read More →

Producers

Laurin Macios

Sunday May 3, 2015 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
PEM East India Marine Hall

Headline Event