Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
Listed in alphabetical order
M.G. Barlow
The World Behind the World: How the Brain Creates Our Conscious Experience — Saturday 11:00 AM
Dave Becker
On Food, Adventure, and the Secret to Successful Self-improvement — Saturday 1:00 PM
Jenna Blum
For the Love of Dog — Saturday 10:15 AM
Jenna Blum is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, The Lost Family; memoir Woodrow on the Bench; WWII podcast “The Key of Love”; and audiocourse “The Author at Work: the Art of Writing Fiction.” Jenna is one of Oprah’s Top 30 Women Authors and CEO/ Cofounder of online author interview startup A Mighty Blaze. Jenna is a professional public speaker, traveling nationally and internationally to talk about writing and her books; she lives in Boston, where she has taught novel, fiction, and marketing workshops for writers for over 20 years, at Grub Street Writers and for A Mighty Blaze. Please visit Jenna at www.jennablum.com and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Joshua Bodwell
Celebrations of the Season: A Conversation with Nina MacLaughlin — Saturday 9:30 AM
Editorial Magic: Author and Editor Reflect on a Novel About Second Chances — Saturday 3:00 PM
Joshua Bodwell served as the executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance for nearly a decade before becoming the editorial director of Godine and Black Sparrow Press. He’s acquired and edited work by authors such as Joan Baez, Ann Beattie, Jane Brox, Shaun Bythell, Brock Clarke, Andre Dubus III, Meredith Hall, Thomas Lynch, Nina MacLaughlin, Billy O’Callaghan, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Anthony Walton, and Alec Wilkinson, just to name a few. He has edited Simon Van Booy’s last three books: Night Came with Many Stars, The Presence of Absence, and Sipsworth. Photo credit: Curt Richter.
Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick is a journalist, essayist, critic, and author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. A Newburyport native, she now lives in New Haven, CT, where she teaches writing at Yale University and is a senior editor of The Yale Review.
Nancy Crochiere
The Ties That Bind: Complicated Families and Their Secrets — Saturday 3:00 PM
Nancy Crochiere’s debut novel, Graceland (2023), was named a top summer read by Parade, Woman’s World, and Deep South Magazines. Her essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Prior to writing fiction, Nancy was a humor columnist for local newspapers and collected her best-loved columns into The Mother Load. With her children now grown, Nancy resides in Amesbury with her husband and a few houseplants that could use more attention. In her spare time, she acts as an extra in TV shows and feature films—anything to increase her odds of bumping into George Clooney.
Caleb Gayle
Caleb Gayle is a Senior Fellow at Northeastern University’s Burnes Center for Social Change and a professor in the School of Journalism with a joint appointment in African Studies in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. An award-winning journalist who writes about the history of race and identity, he holds fellowships at New America, PEN America, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Gayle is the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power, which was a 2023 Massachusetts Book Awards Must Read, and the forthcoming book, Pushahead: The Story of Edward McCabe and His Dreams to Colonize.
Charlotte Gordon
In Bloom: Plants and Their Meanings — Saturday 1:00 PM
Charlotte Gordon’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among other publications. Her books include Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (Random House), winner of the National Book Critics Circle award, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Story of America’s First Poet (Little, Brown), and The Woman Who Named God: Abraham’s Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths (Little, Brown). She has also published Mary Shelley: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) and the Introduction to Penguin’s reissue of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She is currently working on a book about the 19th-century women’s movement, which has received an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The director of the Tadler Center and a distinguished professor of the Humanities at Endicott College, Gordon speaks frequently at colleges and conferences and has been interviewed on numerous radio and television programs across the world. www.charlottegordonbooks.com.
Owen Grey
Breakfast With the Poets: Powow River Poets Read Their Work — Saturday 8:30 AM
Literary Festival Program Moderator, Session I, Breakfast with the Poets
Owen Grey is a poet, editor, and graduate student in counseling. He has been a member of the Powow River Poets since 2012. He organized their celebration of Jane Kenyon’s poetry in 2022. He hosted Breakfast with the Poets at the Newburyport Literary Festival and was a featured reader for the Powow Reading Series in 2023. He is thrilled to be hosting Breakfast with the Poets again in 2024. You can find his poems in The Powow River Poets Anthology II. He lives in central Massachusetts. Photo credit: Maura Kilsdonk.
Jill Oestreicher Gross
Lost Innocence: Daisy Alpert Florin in Conversation With Jill Gross — Saturday 11:30 AM
The Gateless Workshop: A Creative, Critic-Free Approach to Writing & Craft — Sunday 9:30 – 11 AM
Jill Oestreicher Gross is a native New Yorker who moved to Newburyport almost 20 years ago. She is a freelance writer and publicist who earned a master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and has written for publications including Reuters, Newburyport Magazine, and several healthcare trade publications.
Connie Johnson Hambley
Perfect Murders and Twisted Trails — Saturday 3:00 PM
Connie Johnson Hambley’s short stories appear in Mystery Magazine, Running Wild Collection, and the Anthony Award-winning Mystery Writers of America’s anthology, Crime Hits Home. Her writing also appears in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Financial Advisor, and Nature. Connie is co-chair of New England Crime Bake, a past president of Sisters in Crime New England, and a passionate fan of (fictional) crime. Learn more about Connie’s award-winning novels, where family secrets link a world-class equestrian to a Boston-based terrorist cell, at www.conniejohnsonhambley.com.
Liberty Hardy
Liberty Hardy has worked as an indie bookseller, a judge for Book of the Month, and a Hollywood book scout. Currently she is a senior contributor editor for Book Riot, the co-host of the popular All the Books! podcast, and curator of the What’s My Page Again? newsletter. Liberty spends her days in the great state of Maine, where she reads over 600 books a year and lives with her husband and her cats (who hate to read).
Hannah Harlow
Relationships and Revenge in YA Mystery — Sunday 2:15 PM
John Updike’s Ghost: Live from the Book Shop podcast recording with Jami Attenberg and Steve Almond — Sunday 3:30 PM
Hannah Harlow is co-owner of the Book Shop of Beverly Farms in Beverly, Mass. She’s also a recovering publishing industry veteran and writer whose work has appeared in WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Cleaver Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and in a biweekly books column for The Manchester Cricket.
Leslie Hendrickson
The Gateless Workshop: A Creative, Critic-Free Approach to Writing & Craft — Sunday 9:30 – 11 AM
Leslie Hendrickson is a New York City and Connecticut-based journalist. She is also a puppet maker, an Agatha Christie aficionado and has been involved in every Newburyport Literary Festival. She leads a monthly writing group and volunteers for Girls Write Now, mentoring a high school student on writing.
Courtney Hodell
A Pandemic Novel in Three Acts: Michael Cunningham Is Back — Saturday 10:15 AM
Alexandra Jacobs
A Love Story That Transcends Time — Saturday 11:30 AM
Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic for The New York Times, the author of Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch, and an editor of The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots, an anthology of writing from The New York Observer’s glory years.
Robin Kall
The Ocean State Comes to the Bay State — Saturday 11:30 AM
Kirun Kapur
Literary Festival Poetry Program Co-Moderator, Session II
Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second collection, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and was included in the Best Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Kapur serves as editor at The Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the nation’s oldest poetry publications, and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. Photo credit: James Cash.
Molli Wentworth King
Through the Lens: A Conversation With Photographer Greta Rybus
— Sunday 12:00 PM
Molli Wentworth King spent the greater part of her young adult life in Newburyport, and has volunteered with the festival on and off since its inception. After graduating from Tufts University and the Museum School of Art, Molli spent a decade working in the art world in New York City and San Francisco before moving back to her northeast roots. She is the owner of forthcoming gallery, Fairwind Studio, in New Harbor, Maine, where she now resides with her husband and dog.
Laura Szaro Kopinski
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Richard K. Lodge
Opening Night Ceremony: Honoring Newburyport Historians — Friday 6:00 PM
Richard K. Lodge worked as editor of The Daily News of Newburyport for five years before retiring in December 2021. Prior to The Daily News he was editor-in-chief of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham for 15 years and worked as an editor, reporter and photographer at newspapers in Massachusetts and Maine before that. Currently he is a freelance writer and is finishing a biography of Reuben Cross, a mid-20th century fly tier from the Catskills. He also edits The Reel News, the member magazine of the Old Reel Collectors Association (www.orcaonline.org), a post he has held since 2005. Lodge, a Newburyport resident, is a member of the Friends of William Lloyd Garrison and board member of the Newburyport Preservation Trust.
Meg Mitchell Moore
Gaining Agency: Two Literary Agents Talk Business — Saturday 1:30 PM
Meg Mitchell Moore is the USA Today bestselling author of eight novels. She is not a native of Newburyport but she’s lived here longer than she’s lived anywhere else so she has adopted it as her hometown. She has an undergraduate degree from Providence College (go Friars) and a master’s degree in English Literature from New York University. She loves writing, reading, and running on the North Shore and spending time with/attempting to rein in the chaos of her husband, their three teen and young adult daughters, and two exuberantly shedding golden retrievers.
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
Colonialism, Racism, and the Cosmos: A Conversation With Novuyo Rosa Tshuma — Saturday 11:00 AM
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky) won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing and was shortlisted for the Ursula Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Her novel manuscript-in-progress was selected by George R.R. Martin for the Worldbuilder Scholarship. She earned her BA at Cornell University and her MFA at UMass Amherst. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and has taught at UMass Amherst, Clarion West online, and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021 and the NAACP-award nominated Africa Risen (Tor). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, F&SF, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, and Fiyah Literary Magazine for Black Speculative Fiction. She is currently at work on a novel.
Alfred Nicol
Literary Festival Poetry Program Co-Moderator, Session VI
Alfred Nicol was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light. His other publications include Animal Psalms and Elegy for Everyone, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, and The Best American Poetry 2018. Nicol’s translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance, published in November, 2022, has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.” Photo credit: Midge Goldberg
Kristin Bair O’Keeffe
North by Northwest: C.B. Bernard’s Ordinary Bear — Saturday 10:00 AM
Kristin Bair’s latest novel, Agatha Arch Is Afraid of Everything, has made a lot of people laugh out loud…and sob hysterically. People magazine dubbed it a “Best New Book.” Booklist said, “Hilarious!” And one very keen book blogger called it “Amazeballs!” Kristin is also the author of the novels The Art of Floating and Thirsty, as well as essays about Facebook mom groups (gah!), literary citizenship, magical realism, China, bears, adoption, a ranch in New Mexico, and lots more. Her next novel, Clementine Crane Prefers Not To, will be published in spring 2025.
Sam Pfeifle
The Most Literary Game — Saturday 3:00 PM
John Updike’s Ghost: Live from the Book Shop podcast recording with Jami Attenberg and Steve Almond — Sunday 3:30 PM
Zara Raab
Literary Festival Poetry Program Co-Host, Moderator, and Planner
Zara Raab’s most recent book is a new edition of Swimming the Eel. Her poems appear in Arts & Letters, Nimrod, The Dark Horse, River Styx, The Hudson Review, Verse Daily, New Verse News, and Stand (UK). Her literary reviews have appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry Flash, Raven Chronicles, and elsewhere. Having grown up north of San Francisco, where her great-great grandparents settled, she earned degrees from Mills College, University of Michigan, and Lesley University, and eventually settled on the East Coast, north of Boston. She is a Powow River Poet living in a tiny house on Powow Street in Amesbury. Photo credit: Lee Perlman.
José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes
Literary Festival Poetry Program Co-Moderator, Session III
José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes was born and raised in the Philippines. He is the author of Present Values (Backbone Press, 2018), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, Memorious, and Scoundrel Time; and have been featured on The Slowdown. Photo credit: Jaime Stockton.
James Sullivan
B.B. King: From Indianola to Icon — Saturday 5:00 PM
James Sullivan is the author of five books, a longtime arts and culture reporter for the Boston Globe, and program director for the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival.
Alli Tervo
From Bounty Hunting to Fatherhood: Andre Dubus III on His New Book of Essays — Saturday 3:00 PM
Alli Tervo is a multidisciplinary poet, artivist, and body liberationist. Her poetry has been featured on GBH Media, in Boston City Hall, and, most recently, in the Yellow Arrow Journal. She is also the organizer of a local literary arts collective, Technicolor Tangerine Creative Collaborative. She believes that language is a radical method of love and healing, and hopes to forever remain inspired to capture the poetry of her life. She is abundantly grateful for the artists around her and their unceasing ability to inspire her. When she’s not writing, she can be found painting or seeing how sharp she can get her eyeliner wings.
Paulette Demers Turco
Literary Festival Poetry Program Co-Host, Moderator, and Planner
Paulette Demers Turco, a Powow River Poet since 2018, is editor of The Powow River Poets Anthology II (Able Muse Press, 2021) and co-organizer of Powow readings. Her second book, Shimmer, an ekphrastic poetry collection (Kelsay Books, 2023) pairs her poetry with her art. Her poems appear in The Lyric, Ibbetson Street, Mezzo Cammin, The Poetry Porch, Loch Raven Review, Quill & Parchment, and others. Awards include the Robert Frost Poetry Award, Lesley University MFA in Writing President’s Award, and Rockport Ekphrastic Poetry Awards. Born and raised in RI, after a career in optometry in Boston, she enjoys retirement in Newburyport. Photo credit: Nikas Photography.
Kate Tuttle
Small Town, Big Changes: Julia Glass on Vigil Harbor — Saturday 9:00 AM
A past president of the National Book Critics Circle, Kate Tuttle has edited the book sections of The Boston Globe and People magazine. Her reviews, author profiles, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
Ryan H. Walsh
Ryan H. Walsh is a musician and writer from Boston.. His debut book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 (Penguin Press), received rave reviews from The New Yorker, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and was a New York Times end-of-year Critics’ Pick. Since publication, Walsh has toured internationally, speaking at The Belfast Literary Festival, The Irish Literary Festival in London, and locally at The Harvard Club and the Boston Public Library. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vice, Pitchfork, and Boston Magazine, and Walsh was a finalist for the Missouri School of Journalism’s City and Regional Magazine Award in 2015. His long running band—Hallelujah the Hills—has won high praise from Spin, Aquarium Drunkard, and Pitchfork; they’ve toured with acts like the Silver Jews and Titus Andronicus while releasing seven full-length albums as well as scores of singles, EPs, and experimental works. Their latest album, 2019’s I’m You, was declared “Album of the Year” by Glorious Noise, “a lyrical masterpiece,” by Metro, and reviewed 9/10 at The Line of Best Fit.
Steve Yarbrough
B.B. King: From Indianola to Icon — Saturday 5:00 PM
Steve Yarbrough is the author of 12 books, most recently the novel Stay Gone Days. His other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe From the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits, and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History, and Family Men. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Polish, and it has also appeared in Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters—Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris—and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. They divide their time between Stoneham and Krakow. Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.