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), Earth Narratives (exploring ways to let our planet tell stories). Hugo shares studio workspace at The Agency in Beverly, Massachusetts.