Board of Directors.
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Joseph Featherstone
PRESIDENT
Jay Featherstone lives in Gloucester. His chapbook, Vermeer Paints My Mother, is now out through Fenway Press. Two previous full-length collections are Glass (Fenway Press) and Braces’s Cove (New Issues). A Harvard graduate, he served as speechwriter for anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy; as editor of the New Republic; and as headmaster of the Commonwealth School. He has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Michigan State and is well-known for his pioneering work on teacher education. His writing and poems have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Education Review, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Nation, and elsewhere.
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Heidi Wakeman
VICE PRESIDENT
Heidi Wakeman has been writing and evaluating since the fifth grade, when each day in her diary received a letter grade. These days she is less interested in grading, and more interested in gratitude. Heidi is an educator, poet, naturalist, community activist, Gen-Xer, feminist, mother, wife, recovering perfectionist. Her pandemic quote is, “Let’s not waste a good crisis.”
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Mary Baine Campbell
Mary Baine Campbell is Professor of English Emeritus at Brandeis University, where she taught medieval and early modern literature and directed the Creative Writing program. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World: European Travel Writing 400-1600, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for the Best Book of 2001), and two books of poetry. She has held research fellowships at Brown and Columbia Universities, the National Humanities Center (US), the Max Planck Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, and Birbeck College, University of London.
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Dorothy Shubow Nelson
Dorothy Shubow Nelson’s poems have appeared in: Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, 2017; We Are the Port: Stories of Place, Perseverance and Pride, 2015; Polis IV, 2014; Human Architecture VII, 2009; Consequence Vol. I, 2009; Atelier; Café Review; The Bridge; Sojourner; and various community newspapers. Formerly a teacher of writing and literature and Senior Lecturer in English at UMass/Boston, she has published The Dream of the Sea, Early Poems, 2008 and a chapbook, Something Near. She is the editor of The Inner Voice and The Outer World, Writings by Veterans and Their Families, published in 2017. She has led the Cape Ann Veterans Writing Project since the fall of 2013. For this work she received a Commendation Medal from Cape Ann Veterans Services. She has convened and curated numerous poetry readings and events for the Gloucester Writers Center.
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Robert D. Cohan
A founding partner of Cohan Rasnick Plaut LLP, Bob Cohan’s practice focuses on complex business disputes. He has been selected as a Massachusetts Super Lawyer each year since 2011. He is a former Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General, a past lecturer for Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education’s Business Litigation Conference, and the author of significant articles on the subject of business litigation. He has taught and lectured in the areas of business and consumer law. He is also a past member of the Executive Board of the Boston Inn of Court. He is past co-chair of Jewish National Fund’s Lawyers for Israel and currently serves as their national co-chair of the Spectacular Sunday telethon. Bob joined the GWC board in 2022 and was a friend of Vincent Ferrini.
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Adam Tessier
Adam has worked in the arts and education at various organizations for more than twenty years—including a stint running programs for the GWC. He studied at Vassar and holds an MFA from Bennington and is at work on a novel.