The GWC's 2025 reading for International Women's Day.

Readers Include: Peggy Leeco (Merry Men by Carolyn Chute); Susan Steiner (Caste by Isabel Wilkerson); JoeAnn Hart (Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit); Heidi Wakeman (“Jardin de invierno/Winter Garden” by Marjorie Agosín, “Reveille” by Barbara Kingsolver); Nicole Richon-Schoel (Home, by Warsan Shire, Right to Life by Marge Piercy); Dorothy Shubow Nelson (Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, Sonnet for International Women's Day Dorothy Shubow Nelson); Marya DeCarlen (“The Grand Quilt” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Joy Is Not a Crumb by Mary Oliver); Tomra Vacerre (“Claim to Fame #7” by Lydia Davis, How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo); Natalie Simon (Portrait of a Woman by Wisława Szymborska, Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, Good Bones by Maggie Smith)

Miriam Nichols, Professor Emerita at the University of Fraser Valley, will give this year’s annual Charles Olson Lecture, presented at the Gloucester Stage Company in partnership with the Gloucester Writers Center. Nichols will discuss Charles Olson’s early poems written during World War II and the ways he re-imagined the possibility of agency in the public sphere under seemingly impossible conditions.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts the poet Linda McCarriston is a joint citizen of Ireland and the United States. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Talking Soft Dutch (1984); Eva-Mary (1991), which won Northwestern University’s Terrence Des Pres Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Award; and Little River: New & Selected Poems (2000). Featured on Bill Moyers’s PBS Series The Language of Life, McCarriston has received many honors for her work, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Grolier Prize. She lives in Gloucester.

Kathleen Aguero’s latest book is World Happiness Index. Her other collections include After That, Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth Daughter Of,The Real Weather, and Thirsty Day. She has also co-edited three volumes
of multi-cultural literature for the University
of Georgia Press (A Gift of Tongues, An Ear
to the Ground, and Daily Fare). She teaches
in the Solstice low-residency M.F.A. program and in Changing Lives through Literature,
an alternative sentencing program, and is a consulting poetry editor at The Kenyon Review.

Poets, K. Kerstin Prevallet and Linda Norton from the Eliot House read at the Gloucester Writers Center. The evening filled with ritual cleansing, deconstructed Platonic dialogs, and politically engaged pandemic memoir. Both artists delivered their work to an intimate and rapt audience before engaging us in a freewheeling conversation that included Eliot, Olson, the New Yorker, feminist art, Ireland, precarity, and the preciousness of language. Certainly a night we won't soon forget!

Thank you to Linda Bourke, Heidi Wakeman, Gordon Baird, Nick Anderson, Caitlin Featherstone,

Rick Gadbois, Nancy Carolyn Kwant, Bobbie Wayne and the dozens more over the last season for their Fish Tales. Special thanks to Jennifer Brown and Laila Goodman for their expertise. Our next season will start in the fall and will feature mother & son storyteller-in-residence team Sharron Cohan and Nathan Cohan.

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As “the Main Ingredient” says…”Everybody plays the fool sometime There's no exception to the rule Listen, baby, it may be factual, may be cruel. I ain't lyin', everybody plays the fool.”

Storytellers include: Brian Orr, Emily DaSilva,Mark Efinger, Ruth Sullivan,Kyle Linehan,Catherine Clark, Nathan Cohan, Coley Bryan and MC Heidi Wakeman

“Ancestors” from grandmothers to gravestones our storytellers spin poignant sometime comedic tales with;

Sharron Cohan, Brian Orr, Aubry Thelkeld, Sara Allen, Laila Goodman and MC Gabrielle Watling.

Jay Featherstone reads his chapbook-length ekphrastic poem “Vermeer Paints My Mother,” at the Windhover Center for Performing Arts, Rockport, MA. This 25 minute reading was produced by Henry Ferrini for the Glocuester Writers Center. Special Thanks to Adam Tessier and to Lisa Hahn and Duncan Holloman of Windhover Center for Performing Arts. To purchase a copy of the chapbook please go to https://fenwaypress.wordpress.com/

The Berlin International Literature Festival and the Gloucester Writers Center read selections of Salman Rushdie's book on the steps of Gloucester City Hall on Friday 9/30/2022 to promote freedom of literature and public speech as well as to show solidarity with Salman Rushdie who was the victim of a a horrific assassination attempt.