Join us for an evening at Eliot House with New York Times best-selling author Peter Swanson, reading and in conversation with poet and novelist Kevin Carey. Swanson, a recent arrival to Gloucester, and Carey, one of the area’s most respected voices and educators, will discuss the writers’ craft and life through the lenses of their own work and experience.

Space is limited! Let us know you’re coming.

Or…join on Zoom!

Peter Swanson is the Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling author of eight novels, including The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; and his most recent, Nine Lives. His books have been translated into over 30 languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, and Yankee Magazine. A graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College, he lives here in Gloucester with his wife and cat.

Kevin Carey is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. He has published five books: a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People from Red Bird Chapbooks (2014) and three books of poetry from Cavankerry Press: The One Fifteen to Penn Station (2012), Jesus Was a Homeboy (2016) and Set in Stone (2020). His crime novel Murder in the Marsh was published by Darkstroke Books.

Colleen Michaels, Dawn Paul, and Hugo Pellinen share the stage at Rocky Neck for this multi-genre reading.

Colleen Michaels is the author of Prize Wheel (Small Bites Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Passages North, Nixes Mate, The Paterson Review, Cider Press Review, Barrelhouse, and Raising Lilly Ledbetter:Women Poets Occupy the Work Space (Lost Horse Press). Her poems have been commissioned as installations for The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, The Peabody Essex Museum, and The Trustees of Reservations. She directs the Writing Studio at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she hosts the Improbable Places Poetry Tour, bringing poetry to unlikely places like tattoo parlors, laundromats, and swimming pools. Yes, in the swimming pool.

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 Review and Stonecoast Review. She has been awarded residencies at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference and The Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories.   

Hugo Pellinen is a visual artist and writer. His creative projects take images and ideas out of traditional contexts and ask audiences to make new meanings. Hugo has had plays produced at fridge festivals in Albuquerque, New Mexico and in Washington DC, and he has had his visual art shown in Boston, in multiple galleries on the North Shore, and in Sante Fe. His recent explorations include: The Type Liberation Project (letterpress projects from reclaimed type), The Essex Natural History and Typing Society (projects involving text and natural material), La Mora (stories from the heteroglossia of New Mexico), and the planet tell stories). Hugo shares studio workspace at The Agency in Beverly, Massachusetts. 

CURATED BY HEIDI WAKEMAN, storyteller-in-residence for Spring 2023!

Our next Fish Tales is on April Fools Eve. Do you have a Fool story to tell? Email adam@gloucesterwriters.org for more info!