Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
You may know Bob Watts from his “Come for a Walk with Me” Facebook posts. Bob loves walking all over our fair city and sharing images of the history and the beauty of our “Historic Seaport” city, Newburyport. Bob did all of the photography for the past two books, If This House Could Talk, 2020 and 2022. Chris Edmonds has helped with If This House Could Talk program for several years and worked on compiling and editing the accompanying book and keeping the online Map updated. Chris is interested in the local history and styles of architecture and construction of the “Clipper City” buildings and homes. Barb Bailey began researching for the Newburyport Preservation Trust in 2019. She has researched and helped place more than 65 historic plaques around Newburyport and supported community members who have participated in If This House Could Talk.
In Home, M.G. Barlow braids the history of a New England house and town with teachings of motherhood, loss, and tradition—plus a little romance and humor along the way. This memoir explores how a residence is tied to memory, and consequently imbued with significant emotional value. M.G. combines storytelling with her talents as a medical writer in discovering the bridge from house to personal restoration. She resides in Newburyport and is Mom to two awesome sons and a mischievous apricot poodle. Visit M.G.’s website at mgbarlow.com.
Ben Berman is the author of three previous collections of poems. His new book, Writing While Parenting, is a collection of humorous and literary essays that considers what it means to pursue one’s creative passions while also raising a family and explores the strange overlaps between the creative life and procreative life. He has won the Peace Corps Award for Best Book of Poetry, has twice been shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and New England Poetry Club.
Margaret A. Burnham, a professor of law and founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Practice at Northeastern University, is an internationally recognized expert on civil and human rights. She began her career with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, spent years as a practicing attorney, and became the first African American woman judge in Massachusetts. She now serves on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, which is charged with reviewing racially motivated violence that occurred between 1940 and 1979. Professor Burnham’s recent book, By Hands Now Known, has been hailed as a “paradigm-shifting investigation” of Jim Crow-era violence and the legal establishment that sustained it.
Dennis Donoghue’s work has appeared in various journals, magazines, and anthologies including Blue Lake Review, Brandeis Review, Broad River Review, Full Circle Review and Georgetown Review. His 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 working on his second memoir.
Dr. Karen Fine (she/her/hers) is a holistic veterinarian who is fascinated by the relationships between animals and their people. Her memoir, The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life and Mortality, explores her experiences as both a pet owner and veterinarian. She is an associate veterinarian in central Massachusetts, where for twenty-five years she owned and operated her own house call practice. A leading expert in the emerging field of veterinary narrative medicine, she has also authored a textbook called Narrative Medicine in Veterinary Practice. She lives with her husband and son and an assortment of rescues. Photo credit: Constance Owens.
Caleb Gayle is a professor and senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. An award-winning journalist who writes about the history of race and identity, he also holds fellowships at New America, PEN America, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and earned advanced degrees from Oxford University and the Kennedy School of Government and Business School at Harvard University. We Refuse to Forget is considered a “landmark work of untold American history,” a provocative narrative of Black Creek stories that, combined with Gayle’s personal reflections, illuminates how white supremacy has pitted marginalized populations in America against one another.
Gigi Georges turned to narrative non-fiction writing after an extensive career in politics, public service, and academia. A former White House Special Assistant to the President and U.S. Senate State Director, she has taught political science at Boston College, served as Program Director at the Harvard Kennedy School, and been a Managing Director of The Glover Park Group—a leading national public affairs firm. Her commentary and research-based articles have appeared in Time Magazine, the New York Times, Bloomberg.com, LitHub, Governing Magazine, M.I.T.’s Innovations Journal, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Occasional Paper Series. She lives with her family in New Hampshire and Downeast Maine.
Dyke Hendrickson is an author-journalist who lives in Newburyport. His most recent book is “Plum Island: A Vulnerable Gem.” It will reach bookstores in June. It includes 75 color photos, and focuses on the dual nature of the barrier island. The northern sector is inhabited by homes and small enterprises, and the southern portion is occupied by the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. Both face major challenges because of climate change. Hendrickson is the author of “Merrimack: The Resilient River” (2021), and hosts a weekly podcast titled, “Life Along the Merrimack.” He has written seven books.
Ann Hood has said that when she was in seventh grade, she read a book called How To Become An Airline Stewardess that fueled her desire to see the world. And after graduating from URI, she went to work for TWA as a flight attendant. Back then, she says she thought you needed adventures in order to be a writer. She later discovered Eudora Welty’s quiet life in Mississippi and had second thoughts. I wrote my first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, on international flights and on the Train to the Plane, which was the subway out to JFK. It was published in 1987. Since then, I’ve published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, O, Bon Appetit, Tin House, The Atlantic Monthly, Real Simple, and other wonderful places; and I’ve won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing Awards, Best American Spiritual Writing and Travel Writing Awards, and a Boston Public Library Literary Light Award. Ann is a former fiction Honoree at the Newburyport Literary Festival.
Author of The Women With Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II, Katherine Sharp Landdeck is a Professor of History at Texas Woman’s University, the home of the WASP archives. A Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, a Normandy Scholar, and a graduate of the University of Tennessee, where she earned her PhD, Landdeck has studied the WASP for nearly three decades. She is a producer and consultant on several Emmy Award-winning documentaries and has appeared as an expert on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” PBS, the History Channel, and the television series “Mysteries of the Abandoned.” Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Time, as well as in numerous academic and aviation publications. Landdeck is a private pilot who flies whenever she can and is happy to return to the Newburyport Literary Festival!
Alan Lightman is an American writer, physicist, and social entrepreneur. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1974. Since then, Lightman has done fundamental research on the astrophysics of black holes, astrophysical radiation processes, and stellar dynamics. He is a past chair of the High Energy Division of the American Astronomical Society and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. He is the author of numerous books, both nonfiction and fiction, including Einstein’s Dreams, an international bestseller, and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. His essays concern the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology and have been twice named by the New York Times as among the best dozen essays of the year, in any category. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Nautilus, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications. In 2005, Lightman founded Harpswell, a nonprofit organization devoted to empowering young women leaders in Southeast Asia, and he has served as chair of its board. Lightman is the host of the upcoming television series SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science, to premiere on public television in January 2023. The series is based on Lightman’s book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018) and his other writings.
Megan Marshall is the author of three biographies: Margaret Fuller, A New American Life, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction; The Peabody Sisters, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, a finalist for the Christian Gauss Award in Literary Criticism from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program, and the recipient of the 2022 Biographers International Organization (BIO) Award for contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography. Her biographical work has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries — Sunday 10:00 AMGreg Melville is an author, adventure journalist, and tombstone tourist whose writing has appeared in many of the country’s top print publications including Outside, Men’s Health, National Geographic Traveler, and The New York Times. He is also a U.S. Navy veteran. Melville’s acclaimed environmental book Greasy Rider was the ‘campus common read’ for six colleges and universities, and named by the American Library Association as one of the top 100 “Outstanding Books for the College Bound” for the first decade of the 2000s. He has served as an editor at Men’s Journal, Sports Afield, and Footwear News and as a crime reporter for a daily newspaper in Northern Virginia. Melville is in the Navy Reserve. He has deployed to Afghanistan, written speeches for top military officials, and taught English for four years at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was the lone recipient of the school’s Apgar Award for Teaching Excellence in 2019. Born and raised in the Boston area, he now lives with his wife and two kids in Delaware. Yes, Delaware.
On Friendship — Sunday 12:00 PMLane Moore is an award-winning comedian, writer, actor, and musician. She is the former sex and relationships editor at Cosmopolitan, where she received a GLAAD award for her groundbreaking work expanding the magazine’s queer coverage. The New York Times called her comedy show Tinder Live “ingenious.” Both her comedy and her band, It Was Romance, have been praised everywhere, from Pitchfork to Vogue, and her writing has appeared in publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Onion. Her first book is the highly praised How to Be Alone. She lives in New York City.
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 (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals including Poetry Magazine and the New England Review. A recipient of Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant in nonfiction, Carla teaches high school English. Her website is carlapanciera.wordpress.com.
Dr. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at Pennsylvania State University in Altoona, Pennsylvania. She is the author To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord, the editor of Thoreau in His Own Time, and a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Her current work includes a biography of author, reformer, and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and, with Noelle A. Baker, The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition.
On Friendship — Sunday 12:00 PMWill Schwalbe has worked in book publishing (currently as an editor at Macmillan); in digital media; and as a journalist, writing for various publications, including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is the author of Books for Living, Send (co-written with David Shipley), and The End of Your Life Book Club, which was a #1 Indie Next pick, an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year, and spent more than four months on the New York Times bestseller list. His most recent book is We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship, which was published in February. Will has served on the boards of Yale University Press, Kingsborough Community College, and the Asian American Writers Workshop.
In 2019, Frank and Colleen Stiriti moved to Newburyport, where Colleen had grown up. Frank had retired from sales and management positions in the printing industry and Colleen retired from the commercial insurance industry. They set out to try to fulfill a commitment to promote and preserve the work of Newburyport artist and poet, and close family friend since the early 1960s, Fran Dalton. Frank and Colleen organized and viewed thousands of slides, scanned nearly 2000 from which over 200 were chosen to appear in their book, Images of Life, Change & Beauty, Photographs, Poetry & Art, Selections from the works of Fran Dalton, Newburyport, MA. Frank and Colleen continue to research and preserve images and artifacts relating to Fran’s life. This is their first book.
On Friendship — Sunday 12:00 PMChristie O. Tate is a Chicago-based writer and essayist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Pithead Chapel, McSweeney’s, Motherwell, Entropy Magazine, A Perfect Wedding, Together.com, Brain, Child and others. Her debut memoir, Group, published in October 2020 was a Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller.
Alice Sedgwick Wohl is an independent scholar and translator. Her translations include The Life of Michelangelo, by Ascanio Condivi; The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, by Giovan Pietro Bellori; and On Antique Painting, by Francisco de Hollanda.
Robin Clifford Wood is an award-winning poet, essayist, teacher, and author of The Field House, a biography-memoir hybrid about the life of once-renowned writer, Rachel Field. Wood and her husband live in central Maine and enjoy great riches in children, grandchildren, and grand-dogs.
Ghlee E. Woodworth is a 12th-generation Newburyport native. Ghlee’s first publication Tiptoe Through the Tombstones, Oak Hill Cemetery, won awards from the New England (2009) and New York (2010) Book Festivals. She is the creator and author of Newburyport’s Clipper Heritage Trail, a series of self-guided history tours accessed via a website and smartphones. The Clipper Heritage Trail was an American Association for State and Local History Merit Award winner in 2014. Clipper Heritage Trail, Volume I, 2020, was honored with the Reader Views’ Classics Non-Fiction Gold Award and Five Star Review, and the New England and New York Book Festivals’ Honorable Mentions in the Wild Card, Regional Literature, and General Non-Fiction categories. Volume II, 2022 received the Reader View’s Five Star Review. Ghlee was honored with the Distinguished Citizen Award for beneficence to the Newburyport community in 2016 and was the recipient of the Essex National Heritage Commission Pioneer in Partnership Award in 2017 for her contributions to Newburyport’s local history. Trained in gravestone restoration Ghlee has restored over 1,400 gravestones in Oak Hill Cemetery and other burying grounds. Photo credit: Bob Watts.
Historian Donald Yacovone, a lifetime Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, has spent his career studying the antislavery movement, the role of African Americans in the Civil War, and race and gender in American history. He is the recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies, and his book The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, co-written with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was named a 2014 NAACP Image Award winner. Yacovone’s ninth book, Teaching White Supremacy, takes a hard look at the role of white supremacy in teaching history in America and has been reviewed as a “profoundly original cultural history.”
