Joel Dinerstein is the author of several works on the history of cool, including The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago, May 2017), Coach: A Study of New York Cool (Rizzoli 2016), and American Cool (2014). He was the co-curator of American Cool (2014), an acclaimed photography and cultural history exhibit at […]

  Robert Buckeye and Peter Anastas will read from new work in fiction and non-fiction, followed by a dialogue focusing on the writers and texts that have informed and inspired their writing and brought them to where they are now. Anastas will read from his recently completed memoir From Gloucester Out.  Buckeye will read from […]

Don Wellman's most recent publication is Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages (Annex Press, Spring 2017).   He will read from recent translations of the work of Roberto Echavarren and Néstor Perlongher, both are crucial poets with respect to the development of experimental or neobarroco poetry from Latin America. He will also read from a new […]

  As the cold weather settles in, we look forward to catching up on our reading. The Gloucester Writers Center starts is on its winter break. We look forward to seeing you  as we open the season with our Open Mic on February 5.

An informal get-together in Josh’s shed, the Responders take turns providing prompts and convene every Friday night to share responses and constructive critique over drinks by the fire. The get-together became a pact of “at least 52 weeks,” which has been fulfilled with this reading of selections from the past year. Organically, themes of Ward […]

Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been postponed. We will announce a new date soon. 10 Playwrights & 10 Ten-Minute Plays. Come and join us for the 1st performance of the plays and give your feedback to the playwrights! Reception after the performance. Rocky Neck Cultural Center. $10 Suggested donation - No one turned […]

A daybook, a memoir, and a serial poem, Ironstone Whirlygig is also something else. The book began as a blog written in stolen moments--in the hours between the local closing and the sun coming up, when children and husband are asleep and the world is quiet and still enough to allow the mind to remake […]

Nausheen Eusuf is a PhD candidate in English at Boston University and a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her poetry has appeared in The American Scholar, Southwest Review, Salmagundi, PN Review, Literary Imagination, World Literature Today, and other journals. Her first collection of poems, Not Elegy, But Eros, was recently published by NYQ Books (US) and Bengal Lights Books […]

Joan Houlihan will be reading poems from her newly-published book, Shadow-feast, from Four Way Books. Houlihan is the author of four other books of poetry: Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (2003); The Mending Worm, (which received the 2006 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press); The Us (2009), which received a Must Read distinction from […]

French poet and native Sétois Paul Valéry referred to Sète as “L’ile Singulière,” the remarkable island. George Brassens, popular singer/songwriter and poet also drew inspiration from this Mediterranean port city and its inhabitants. New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda directed her debut film La Pointe Courte in a Sétois fishing neighborhood of the same name. In […]

Cape Ann author Sandra Williams, will read selections from her first collection of short stories. Time and Tide is an assortment of tales, speaks of change—sometimes a long time coming, sometimes in an instant, but always inevitable. The first story, “Book of Hours,” creates the frame for the rest of the tales. Helen, an American writer […]

Garrison Nelson: Elliott A. Brown Green and Gold Professor of Law, Politics, and Political Behavior Department of Political Science  reads from his new book on John McCormack. Before the house had Tip O'Neill, there was John McCormack. How did this man, with an eighth grade education and a false family history, become Speaker of the […]

Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, is the author of 17 poetry collections, including Sing This One Back to Me (Coffee House Press), and A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, a collaboration with Chuck Close), and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. These days, a lot […]

BUDDHA and HAMLET in BEDLAM: SYNOPSIS The play is set at McLean Hospital where Hamlet is admitted, misdiagnosed “psychotic with homicidal hallucinations,” and prescribed Haldol, an antipsychotic medication. Hamlet requests a second opinion and Dr. Frank Faith diagnoses “parasomnia,” discontinues Haldol, and cures Hamlet through holistic psychiatry: body (fencing), mind (playwriting), and spirit (meditation). In […]

In addition to Post & Rail, Erica Funkhouser has published four books of poetry with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and one with Alice James Books. Included in Sure Shot (HM 1992) are three dramatic monologues in the voices of 19th century American women: Sacagawea, Louisa May Alcott, and Annie Oakley. The Oakley poem was adapted for […]

Among other books, Ann Charters has written & edited two books about & by Charles Olson in the 1960s, compiled a bibliography of Jack Kerouac & wrote his first biography (1973), and edited ten editions of the college textbook THE STORY AND ITS WRITER (1985-2019).   Her talk is  A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE: REVISITING […]

Jewish temple worship and Christian communion are both the direct product and development of late Bronze Age (1200-1000 BCE) ritual orgy.  So-called Echidnaic-Ios rites sprang from the genius of a single pre-classical venom specialist, a female immigrant to ancient Georgia, who pioneered the use of her vagina as a device for bio-engineering and administering psychotropic […]

Raymond Foye was born in 1957 in Lowell, Mass. He is a writer, curator, editor and publisher. He studied with Stan Brakhage at the Art Insitute of Chicago. He was a literary editor with City Lights Books, New Directions, and Black Sparrow Press. He was Director of Exhibitions and Publications at Gagosian Gallery from 1990-95. […]

Symbiotic Earth How Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution. Explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a scientific rebel who challenged entrenched theories of evolution to present a new narrative: life evolves through collaboration.  "An amazing film...I was on the edge of my seat the entire film, completely engrossed in the story […]

      Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in March 2017. A three-time Pushcart-Prize nominee, she’s also the author of Western Motel (Turning Point, 2012) and the chapbook Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007). Her poems have appeared widely or are forthcoming in […]

Women's Work on Charles Olson Kate Colby is author of seven books of poetry, including The Arrangements (Four Way Books, 2018). A book of literary essays, Dream of the Trenches (Noemi Books, 2019), is forthcoming. Fruitlands won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2007. She has received awards […]

God Bless Cambodia is a picaresque comedy about a never-married hypochondriac who takes a trip around the world hoping to change his luck with love. It's an unflinching look at how men feel about sex, love, marriage, and massage parlors. The book features adult situations, adult language, and more adult situations. "A very entertaining story […]

  Like Vincent Ferrini, poet Linda McCarriston is a native of Lynn. She has two sons and four granddaughters. It took her much longer to settle in Gloucester than it did Vincent (she treasures a copy of No Smoke that he gave her in 2002). Educated in Lynn's Catholic schools, she won some high-school writing […]

Schuyler Hoffman has published two books of poetry: Words in a Foreign Language and The Spaces Between as well as the collaborative poetry-music CD Sacrifice. His work has appeared in The Café Review and in The Anthology of Post-Beat Poetry in translation in China. His new book Signal to Noise explores the myriad ways that […]

A mosaic is made of many pieces together, as is our fine city. Three organizations are collaborating to present The Mosaic that is Gloucester: MosaicGloucester; Maritime Gloucester; and the Gloucester Writer’s Center. In Part 3 of the event, The Gloucester Writers Center and The Maud/Olson Library will present What Holds Us Together: This Place in […]

  On Sunday, May 5, from 1 to 3 p.m., Literary Cape Ann presents three of our region’s best-selling authors sharing stories about how their books became popular movies and what that career-changing experience was like. Our panelists are Rodman Philbrick, author of “Freak the Mighty,” a middle grade book still taught in schools and […]

Come remember and celebrate Gerrit Lansing with poems, song and stories.

Donald Wellman, poet, editor, and translator, his recent book of poetry is Essay Poems (Dos Madres: Loveland OH). Other books from Dos Madre include The Cranberry Island Series and A North Atlantic Wall; Prolog Pages was issued by Ahadada (2009); Fields (Light and Dust 1995). For several years, he edited O.ARS, a series of anthologies, […]

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Jay Featherstone’s Glass is true to its title as these poems allow the reader to look straight though language to see clearly how joy and loss are inextricably connected (“On the path to impoverishment,/tenderness. // In the long taking away, / hearing festival sounds / through all the streets of the city.”). From Wilkes-Barre to […]

In July 1976, a twenty-four-year-old white woman, Margo Olson, was found in a shallow grave in Stamford, Connecticut, with an arrow piercing through her heart. A few weeks later, Howie Carter, her black boyfriend, was killed by the police. Howie and Margo’s interracial relationship held a distorted mirror to the author’s own, with Howie’s best […]

Áine’s presentation will focus on writing personal essays--such as those published in The Boston Globe Magazine, Brevity, The New York Times Modern Love series and other publications. She will discuss the risks and rewards of writing about our personal experiences, including why and how she wrote and published her just released essay collection (about immigration) 30+ […]

Cathy Curtis is the author of two previous biographies of women artists, RESTLESS AMBITION: GRACE HARTIGAN, PAINTER (Oxford University Press, 2015) and A GENEROUS VISION: THE CREATIVE LIFE OF ELAINE DE KOONING (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her next book will be a biography of the novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. Curtis was elected to a two-year […]

Ann Charters will be talking about how Charles Olson influenced her a young writer.  She met him in 1968, after she had spent the years 1963-65 in the graduate English program at Columbia.  Her dissertation was about 19th century writers in the Berkshires, with chapters on Melville and Hawthorne.  When she began to read Olson […]

Join us for a night of fun and reading of three completely different kinds of books! Jane Keddy and Barbara Boudreau are both charter members of The Finish Line, a writer's group that formed in the fall of 2011 and continues today. Both women have published books, Boudreau's novel, The Frenchman in 2013 and Keddy's Serial Monogamy earlier […]

Eloise Weld Hodges grew up in Essex, then moved in 1954 with her family to Dolliver’s Neck, Gloucester.  As Associate Editor and feature writer for North Shore Magazine (1975-80), she wrote about people and places that illuminated that part of the world.  She will read from Wishbone, a collection of essays about family events and related […]

Ellen Wilkin has been writing for 45 years as a poet and essayist, as a technical writer and editor in the computer industry, and as a novelist. Several of her poems were published in THE POETRY JAM SESSIONS, a collection she also edited. Her current project is a science fiction/time travel novel.  She also runs […]

Patrick Barron grew up in the Pacific Northwest, lived in Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy for a number of years, and is now based in Boston, where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in various journals. His most recent books are Towards the River's Mouth (Verso […]

Stephen Fredman is the author of "'Difficulties Are Once More': Charles Olson, John Dewey, and the Rhythm of Experience.”  Stephen's talk considers three features of Olson's writing--rhythm, history, and performance--as they occur in works composed during his time at Black Mountain College. The American pragmatist, John Dewey, will be our companion, especially his Art as […]

Joey Gould is a non-binary poet from Hopedale who tutors & often works with Mass Poetry for content writing, event planning, hosting, & performing. Their writing has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, District Lit, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, & Memoir Mixtapes. Joey performs in the Boston cast of The Poetry Brothel as Izzie Hexxam & […]

Join us for a marathon reading of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems

In Which Side Are You On, author James Sullivan delivers a lively anecdotal history of the progressive movements that have shaped the growth of the United States, and the songs that have accompanied and defined them. Come share in the music with a perfect handful of Cape Ann Musicians singing there own interpretations of these […]

The news is overwhelming. How do you sort through it? Where to begin? How do you know what's true? Come listen to a journalist outline how she ferrets out information using tools of the trade. You'll learn how to: - Identify a meme or unreported story vs. news written by professional journalists - Figure out […]

Buy tickets here.       If you have  a story you'd like to tell, please contact Casey Breton at caseybreton@outlook.com.

A reading from spoKe six including David Rich reading from his essay on Gerrit Lansing, James Cook reading from his essay on Sam Cornish, poems by John Mulrooney, Jim Dunn and Amanda Cook. Hosted by Karina Van Berkum and Kevin Gallagher.   David Rich worked as the poet Gerrit Lansing’s archivist from 2017 to 2018, […]

This event will be closed to the public. Please join us for the live stream on Facebook! Peter Almond is a documentary and narrative filmmaker, whose career includes work on public issues as a journalist and in public policy with both US and international projects. Current work include a drama set in the lead up […]

Please stay tuned for updates.

Dear Friends, During this time of mass isolation we are  hunkering down with our Board to explore, regroup and reimagine how we can best serve the community while moving sustainably into our this unpredictable future.  To do this we are temporarily suspending our live programming and events until the invisible storm passes.   We want […]

Host Roger Davis invites you to our   Virtual OPEN MIC.      First Monday of the month!    Sign in at 7:15pm and chat.   Reading begins @ 7:30  Click Here to go to Zoom  or paste this. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/71829688421?pwd= UURXYXF0RXVwZTFGYUF5 cmgzb2hHZz09   Anyone needing help with Zoom sign in can email  Roger at 16rdavis@gmail.com    Meeting ID: […]