GWC Board of Directors

  • Henry Ferrini- President is the co-founder of the Gloucester Writers Center, the President of the North Shore Jazz Project and a documentary filmmaker. His work has played on PBS and at museums and galleries around the world. His films include: Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, Poem in Action, a portrait of his uncle Vincent Ferrini and Lowell Blues: the Words of Jack Kerouac. He is developing a new film about the iconic jazz stylist Lester Young. He lives in Gloucester with his wife and son.
  • Anne Thomas- Clerk is the co-founder of Gloucester Writers Center. Vincent Ferrini was her close friend for 37 years and the godfather of her children. Annie brings years of nonprofit management experience to the project, including expertise in volunteer coordination and 12 years experience of highly successful fundraising as Development Director of Wellspring House, Inc. She also brings a commitment to maintaining the Vincent Ferrini House as a place of hospitality and nurture, in his honor.
  • Peter Higgins – Treasurer , has spent the last 33 years working in the manufacturing sector. He works as the treasurer of Bomco, Inc., a locally owned business that primarily supports the aerospace industry. He has served in the past as vice-chair of the Gloucester Conservation Board and has a degree in anthropology from Syracuse University.
  • Peter Anastas, is a Gloucester-born writer and activist. He is the author of Glooskap's Children: Encounters with the Penobscot Indians of Maine (Beacon Press), Landscape with Boy, a novella in the Boston University Fiction Series, At the Cut: Growing up in Gloucester in the 1940s, a memoir (Dogtown Books), Broken Trip: a novel (Glad Day Books), No Fortunes: a novel (Back Shore Press), and the forthcoming novel, Decline of Fishes (Back Shore Pres). He is also the editor of Maximus to Gloucester: The Letters and Poems of Charles Olson to the Editor of the Gloucester Daily Times, 1962-1969 (Ten Pound Island Books), and is the founding president of the Charles Olson Society.
  • Timbah Bell
  • Kate Colby, is an American poet. She graduated from Wesleyan University and with an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 1997, she moved to San Francisco and worked for several years at Institute for Unpopular Culture as a volunteer. Fruitlands her 2007 book of poetry won the Norma Farber First Book Award. In 2008, she moved in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches and works as an editor. Her work has appeared in Aufgabe, New American Writing, NO: a journal of the arts, and Parthenon West Review.
  • Rev. Wendy Fitting, is the Pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Gloucester where she has served since 1989, after receiving a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. Prior to entering the ministry she worked for the Mass Department of mental health. She shares with Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini a love of Gloucester and the appreciation of the particularity of place — a theme that is central to her ministry.
  • Greg Gibson, is a writer, publisher, and has been an Antiquarian book dealer since 1976, specializing in old and rare maritime books, documents, manuscripts and ephemera, and in the Literature of Cape Ann, about which he compiled a lengthy bibliography in 1979. His publishing house Ten Pound Books has published 30 books, including Vincent Ferrini's autobiography Hermit of the Clouds and Peter Anastas’ Maximus to Gloucester. He is the author of Gone Boy (Random House), Demon of the Waters (Little Brown) and Hubert’s Freaks (Harcourt) as well as numerous small press publications.
  • André Spears, is an experimental writer and independent scholar. His most recent publication is the bilingual book Translation, published in France in June, 2010. He earned a doctorate in Comparative Literature, with an area of concentration in the interrelation of literature and archaeology; his dissertation addressed the image of archaic Mesoamerica in the writings of Lawrence, Artaud and Olson. Concurrently, he worked as a freighter- and tanker-broker, because of family interests in the shipping business. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors at Poets House in lower Manhattan.
  • Dorothy Shubow Nelson’s book, The Dream of the Sea. Early poems was published in 2008. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Sojourner, The Café Review, Rhythm Magazine, atelier, North Shore North, Consequence Magazine, and Human Architecture, The Promise of Poetry in Memories of Mahmoud Darwish, (2009). She taught writing and literature at UMass Boston for many years. She has served as a community and labor activist in greater Boston and with the Black Lung Association of West Virginia. She was an editor for the East Boston Community News , and edits Union News for the faculty staff union at UMass/Boston. She corresponded with Vincent Ferrini and was a close friend for over 35 years. Many of his poems and letters to her are archived with the Cape Ann Museum. In 2009 she presented a paper on Charles Olson at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Conference.

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  • Random Quote


    by Vincent Ferrini
    THE THEORY OF POETRY

    The air is an organic farm
    for the practitioners of Paradise


  • "my visit to the
    Gloucester Writers Center was very inspirational...
    There's something about that set of rooms, the Center,
    that seems to shout "Yes!" to poetry, writing, rumination,
    study and planning."

    Ed Sanders

    The Gloucester Writers Center is a place for working writers in a town that knows about work.