Listed in alphabetical order
Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
Dale Arnold began broadcasting football, basketball and hockey games on WCME in Brunswick, Maine, in 1971. Upon graduating from Bowdoin College in 1979, he became the play-by-play announcer for the Maine Mariners, following Mike Emrick in the role. He moved to radio play-by-play for the New Jersey Devils in 1986, returning to New England as radio voice for the New England Patriots in 1988. Arnold became a talk show host on WEEI Radio in Boston in 1991, and added Boston Bruins radio play-by-play duties in 1995 and moved to television play-by-play on NESN for the Bruins the following season. His duties hosting Boston Bruins games on NESN began in 2011. Arnold also served as a play-by-play voice for the New England Revolution (MLS) for a season, served fill-in voice for the Boston Celtics (NBA) for several seasons and has also called plays for Boston Red Sox (MLB). He is the only person in Boston broadcast history to serve as play-by-play announcer for all five professional sports teams in the city. He is also a four-time New England regional Emmy Award winner and has been inducted into Maine Association of Broadcasters and Massachusetts Broadcasters Association Halls of Fame.
Upton Bell is the former general manager of the New England Patriots and personnel director of the Baltimore Colts, where he built two Super Bowl teams including the Super Bowl V champions. He was the owner of the World Football League Charlotte Hornets’ franchise. After leaving pro football he went on to a 50-year career in radio and television broadcasting in Boston. He is the co-author of his memoir, Present at the Creation.
A veteran of stage and screen, Peter Berkrot’s career spans four decades. Highlights include feature roles in Caddyshack and Show-time’s Brotherhood, and appearances on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries. He is a prominent acting coach and a regular VO contributor to the award-winning news program Frontline produced by WGBH in Boston. Peter served as director of narration for the Emmy-nominated The Truth About Cancer. A nominee for a 2025 Audie Award for the Audio Drama THE REAL EDUCATION OF TJ CROWLEY, Peter has voiced close to 700 audiobooks and more than 300 for children, winning 12 Earphones Awards and a solo 2012 Audie Award nomination. He received SOVAS awards in 2018 and 2019. His 2016 Audie Award was as part of a multi cast performance for THE STARLING PROJECT, starring Alfred Molina and was part of the ensemble in the Audible Original THE X-FILES: COLD CASES starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. In 2019 he was honored along with a brilliant cast of actors for THE VAULT OF HORROR, directed by William Dufris with an Independent Audiobook Award for AUDIO DRAMA.
An on-camera actor, video game and commercial voice actor, Chris Ciulla has narrated over 580 audiobook titles and produced and/or directed another 100. He is also the founder and CEO of Leonardo Audio and Nor’easter Publishing. Just this month, he received an Earphones Award from AudioFile Magazine for his performance of Elliot Ackerman’s Sheepdogs, and shared an Earphones Award for the multi-cast performance of The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. In 2023, he received two Audie nominations for Best Thriller (Snowstorm in August, Blackstone Audio) and Best Multi-Cast (Star Trek: No Man’s Land, Simon and Schuster Audio), and a SOVAS nomination for Best Fantasy (They Split the Party, CamCat). Ciulla’s screen credits include shows like Castle and Gotham, and he recently shot a recurring role in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for Apple TV. He’s also an interactive voice actor with over 30 characters in the Fallout game series and companion Mickey Caviar in Starfield for Bethesda, and can be heard voicing the Ultimate History Quiz on your nearest Alexa device for The History Channel. Ciulla’s ultimate goal for Nor’easter is for it to become the premier landing spot for New England authors in creating a pathway for their content to be developed, adapted and packaged into Film, TV and Interactive Gaming projects. Please visit the company website at https://www.leonardoaudio.com.
Clarey’s in-depth biography — The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer — was published in 22 languages and became a New York Times bestseller and international bestseller. Documentary film rights were sold to MRC, a major global entertainment company. The book was revised and re-released in North America and internationally in 2024 after Federer’s retirement. In 2022, The Master was named one of the Best Sports Books of the Year by The Times of London and was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, the leading literary sports writing prize in English. Based on 20 years of interviews and travels following the Swiss champion and a golden age in men’s tennis, Booklist gave The Master a starred review and named it one of the best 10 sports and recreation books of the year, as did The Daily Mail and booksellers Waterstones and Barnes and Noble. Corriere dello Sport in Italy called it a “monumental opera.” Le Monde called it “an indispensable bible for all tennis fans.” The New York Public Library selected “The Master” as its “book of the day” on March 7, 2022. Clarey’s second book, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay, comes out in May 2025.
Tom Desjardin holds a PhD in U.S. history and has written several books on the Civil War with an emphasis on Gettysburg. During the 1990s he served as the archivist and historian at Gettysburg National Military Park. He later taught Civil War history at Bowdoin College in Maine where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gettysburg hero Joshua Chamberlain was a student, professor, and president. Experienced in both television and film, Desjardin served as the historical advisor to actor Jeff Daniels for his role as Chamberlain in the films Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. He and his work have been featured on the History Channel, A&E, Discovery, PBS, and CSPAN. He is a former commissioner of education in Maine and director of the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands.
Write with the NLF and Sara Reish Desmond! — Sunday 9:00 AM
Bethany Groff Dorau became the executive director of the Museum of Old Newbury after twenty-one years with Historic New England. She is the author of A Newburyport Marine in World War I: The Life and Legacy of Eben Bradbury and A Brief History of Old Newbury and has won several awards for preservation advocacy and museum leadership. Bethany has appeared on This Old House and Chronicle and has published articles in The New York Times, New England Quarterly, and Historic New England Magazine, among others.
Dr. Kendra Taira Field is the Gerald R. Gill Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Tufts University. She is currently a Hutchins Fellow at Harvard University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country, which traced her own ancestors’ lives in slavery and freedom. Her current book project, The Stories We Tell, is a history of African American genealogy and storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present, and winner of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Field abridged David Levering Lewis’s W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, and her scholarly articles have appeared in numerous journals. As a public historian, Field co-founded the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists, and serves as chief historian for the 10 Million Names Project. Before entering the academy, she worked in education, organizing, and the nonprofit sector in Boston and New York.
Plastic Inc.: A “Compelling True-Crime Story” — Sunday 11:30 AMBeth Gardiner is an American journalist based in London. Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet is her second book. Her first, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, was named one of 2019’s best by The Guardian. It was a finalist for the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society book award, and a winner of the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. Beth’s work has been published in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Smithsonian and Yale Environment 360.
Caleb Gayle is the author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (longlisted for the National Book Award) and We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. An award-winning journalist and professor at Northeastern University, Gayle’s writing has been recognized by the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, the Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship, the New America Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among others. Caleb’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Three Penny Review, Guernica, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Pacific Standard, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Root, Daily Beast, and more. He lives near Boston.
Sierra Gitlin is a Newburyport-based writer, actor, and musician whose work wanders comfortably between theater, music, history, and the written word. She works closely with the Museum of Old Newbury and performs regularly with Theater in the Open and other local arts organizations. Across disciplines—from song to stage performance to historic preservation—she is drawn to storytelling that brings historical voices into conversation with the present, and is passionate about the community-building and healing power of the arts. She lives and works in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Alex Green is the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled. Green teaches political communications at Harvard Kennedy School and is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, a senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation, and a visiting scholar at the Brandeis University Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. He has piloted a nationally recognized disability history curriculum for high school students, developed and taught the first graduate disability policy course offered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Policy, and authored legislation to create a first-of-its-kind, disability-led human rights commission to investigate the history of state institutions for disabled people in Massachusetts. That work led to major legislative reform in Massachusetts, resulting the unsealing of millions of documents on the state’s history of institutionalizing disabled people.
Peter Guralnick has been called “a national resource” by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country’s intertwined Black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; Sweet Soul Music; Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke; and Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll. His most recent books are Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing and The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World. He wrote the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary, Feel Like Going Home.
Four Books a Fortnight with the Book Shop of Beverly Farms — Sunday 3:30 PMHannah Harlow is co-owner of the Book Shop of Beverly Farms in Beverly, Massachusetts, and co-host of the literary podcast Four Books a Fortnight. 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.
Wil Haygood is the author of ten nonfiction books, many of which have won literary awards. His book The Butler was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. Haygood has been a correspondent for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022, he received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently the Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio.
Alan Lightman is an American physicist and writer. PhD in physics, Caltech. He 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. Lightman is the recipient of six honorary doctoral degrees. 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, culture, philosophy, and theology. His most recent nonfiction books are Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, The Transcendental Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, and The Miraculous from the Material. Lightman is the host of the public television series “SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” based on his books. In 2005, Lightman founded Harpswell, a nonprofit organization devoted to empowering young women leaders in Southeast Asia. In August 2023, Lightman was appointed a member of the United Nation’s Scientific Advisory Board, reporting directly to the Secretary General.
Gabrielle Oliveira is an anthropologist of education whose research examines immigration, mobility, and family life across borders, with a focus on children’s education, gender, and transnationalism in the Americas. She is the author of Motherhood Across Borders (NYU Press), winner of the Erickson and Hornberger Book Award and the Council on Anthropology and Education’s Book of the Year Award, and Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life (Stanford University Press). The book has just won the American Educational Research Association Book of the Year of 2026. Oliveira’s ethnographic work spans multiple countries and centers on immigrant children and families navigating educational systems, including dual language programs. She is currently working on a third book based on research with immigrant children in public schools in northern Brazil. Her work appears in leading journals across anthropology and education, and she has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, BBC, Univision, and TV Globo.
Four Books a Fortnight with the Book Shop of Beverly Farms — Sunday 3:30 PM
Bob Ryan is a retired American sportswriter, author, and speaker, best known for his 50-plus year career with The Boston Globe. He is widely recognized for his in-depth coverage of basketball, particularly his stories about the Boston Celtics. He has been called “the quintessential American sportswriter.” Ryan has written for the Globe since 1968, and continues to write a regular Globe Sunday column on his sporting thoughts. He is the author of a dozen books including a memoir: “Scribe: My Life in Sports.”
The Search for The Golden Toad — Sunday 10:15 AMKyle Ritland earned his MFA in creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, while working as a freelance environmental journalist, chasing stories of island foxes, desert birds, and big cats. He lives at the edge of the woods in the American Northeast with his wife and son and their two cats, Hazel and Fiver.
Trevor Ritland spent two years in the cloud forests of Costa Rica before returning to the U.S. to complete graduate work in documentary studies and science communication. His writing and photography exploring imperiled species and environmental mysteries have been published by Orion, Atlas Obscura, Mongabay, and Re:wild. Trevor lives with his wife and daughter (and their dog) in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Nina Sankovitch is the author of five nonfiction books, including American Rebels: How the Hancock. Adams, and Quincy Families Fanned the Flames of Revolution and The Lowells of Massachusetts. Not Your Founding Father: How a Nonbinary Minster Became America’s Most Radical Revolutionary is her latest book and explores the forgotten history of America’s first home-grown minister and first nonbinary minister, and the first leader in the United States to implement the ideals for which the American Revolution was fought, including equality and opportunity. Sankovitch has written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Vogue, and other media, and was formerly a judge for the Book of the Month Club. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, Sankovitch grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and currently lives in New York City.
Michael Updike spent his childhood in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and has lived in Newburyport/Newbury since 1992. He is an artist, designer, and sculptor who works in many mediums and styles. For more than three decades, he has designed for the import gift company Mariposa. Michael exhibits his carved slate tiles in galleries and art festivals across New England. He carves personalized gravestones for clients, annually carving his own gravestone, and is working on a series of humorous, irreverent stones. He has given presentations at John Updike and Philip Roth Society conferences. This winter he has presented readings of the recently published Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff. He is currently serving on the John Updike Literary Trust.
Geordie Vining is the senior project manager for Newburyport’s Office of Planning and Development. Since he started working for the city in 2001, Geordie has managed dozens of community improvement projects, including the Clipper City Rail Trail, new public buildings such as the Senior Community Center, Harbormaster Office, and Cutter Fire Station, renovations of parks, boardwalks, and public spaces, land and watershed conservation, public sculptures and murals, historic interpretive signage, and more.
Ghlee E. Woodworth is a 12th-generation Newburyport native. Ghlee is the creator of Newburyport’s Clipper Heritage Trail, a series of self-guided history tours accessed via the web, brochures, and smartphones (2014). She is the author of Tiptoe Through the Tombstones, Oak Hill Cemetery (2009) and Newburyport Clipper Heritage Trail Volume I (2020) and Volume II (2022), and Newburyport’s Black Heritage Trail brochure series (2024). For the past twenty years, Ghlee has conducted over 330 slideshow presentations and walking, bus, and boat tours of cemeteries, neighborhoods, and the city. Trained in gravestone restoration, Ghlee has restored over 1,900 gravestones in Oak Hill Cemetery, city cemeteries, and other burying grounds. Ghlee has won several awards for contributions honoring Newburyport history.
