MODERN MEMOIR: A Panel Reading + Conversation

Ellie O’Leary, Jennifer Freed, Carla Panciera + Dennis Donoghue

Live at Rocky Neck, four writers explore the contours of memoir today, and read from their own work.

Free and open to all…though donations are encouraged and appreciated!

Carla Panciera was born in Westerly, RI, and lives in Rowley, MA. She is the author of Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press), and Bewildered (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Award. She has also published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores, Winner of the Cider Press Book Award and No Day, No Dusk, No Love winner of the Bordighera Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals including Poetry Magazine and the New England Review.

Jennifer Freed is an award- winning poet who has been leading Writing Craft programs for organizations including Yale Women Writers, the Stanley Kunitz Home Summer Writing Program, and her own local library. She is the author of When Light Shifts, a memoir-in-poems, which was named a 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club.

Dennis Donoghue’s memoir, The Final One Eighty about his last year teaching sixth grade before he retired, was published by Adelaide Books in 2020. He is currently at work on a second memoir, We’ll Do What’s Best for You, which chronicles his working as a CNA in a nursing home during COVID as well as his daughter’s drug addiction. His short stories and essays have been published in various journals, including Blue Lake Review, Georgetown Review, The Lowell Pearl, The Sun, and Full Circle Journal.

Ellie O’Leary, the Education Director at the Gloucester Writers Center, is also the Poet Laureate Emerita of Amesbury, Massachusetts. She has published Breathe Here (poetry, 2020) and Up Home Again (memoir, 2023), both with North Country Press.