Newburyport Literary Festival

A Celebration of Literature, Readers, and Writers
• 20th Anniversary •
• In-Person & Virtual Events • April 25–27, 2025

Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |

Listed in alphabetical order
Meredith Bergmann

Meredith Bergmann

Meredith Bergmann is a sculptor with public monuments in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. Her new book, The Dying Flush (EXOT Books, 2024), presents her poetry and illustrations to tell a historical mystery story involving poets and their beloved dogs. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Barrow Street, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, Raintown Review, TriQuarterly Review, and several anthologies: The Powow River Poets Anthology II, Hot Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, and Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017. Photo credit: Michael Bergmann. Powow member page. Author website.
Featured Book
Meredith Bergmann Book
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021). His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Plume Poetry, and elsewhere. Aaron currently serves as a member of the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee and as a senior reader for Beloit Poetry Journal. His paintings have appeared in galleries throughout Connecticut, including Chester Gallery, the John Slade Ely House, Westport Arts Center, and City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University. Photo credit: Louisa Caycedo-Kimura. Author website.
Featured Book
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Book
Charles Coe

Charles Coe

Charles Coe is the author of four books of poetry. His newest book is Purgatory Road. All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents, Picnic on the Moon, and Memento Mori, all published by Leapfrog Press. He is also author of Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media. Charles is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island and Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, teaching in both MFA writing programs. Author website.

Featured Book
Charles Coe Book
Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen is the author of eight collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments. Other recent books include Everything and Nightshade. Cohen’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several residencies at MacDowell. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA and is teaching poetry at Boston University this spring. Photo credit: Razia Iqbal. Author website.
Featured Book
Andrea Cohen Book
Rhina Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat, Dominican-born, bilingual, and a much-honored Newburyport translator and educator, published two new books of translation (Wiseblood Books) in 2023: The Spring that Feeds the Torrent: Poems of St. John of the Cross and The Liquid Pour in which my Heart has Run: Poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her published work includes poetry, essays, and short stories, and appears frequently in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is a founding member of two long-lived, active poetry workshops: NYC’s Fresh Meadows Poets and Newburyport’s Powow River Poets. Honors include the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, Richard Wilbur Award, Oberon Poetry Prize. Powow member page.
Featured Book
Rhina Espaillat Book
Rhina Espaillat Book
Marcia Karp

Marcia Karp

Marcia Karp has poems and translations in The TLS; Harvard Review; Agenda; The Guardian; Ploughshares; Partisan Review; Penguin Books’ Catullus in English and Petrarch in English; Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 (Waywiser); The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (Norton); and in her collection, If by Song (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021). Author website.
Featured Book
Marcia Karp Book
Mary Kuck

Mary Kuck

Mary Kuck, a Midwesterner at heart, born and raised in Illinois, has lived much of her adult life in New England and Jamaica, West Indies. Her chapbook, Intermittent Sacraments, was published by Finishing Line Press (2021). Her poetry appears in the Connecticut Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, From the Depths, Poetry Quarterly, Main Street Rag, and others. Honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination, Honorable Mention in the Connecticut River Review Poetry Contest, and her poem “Hush” set to music and published in an instructive songbook for children. A retired language teacher, she lives in Massachusetts. Photo credit: Deej Buhlazar @ Greyson Photography. Powow member page.
Featured Book
Mary Kuck Book
Cynthia Manick

Cynthia Manick

Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023; editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry; and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell among other foundations. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus and other outlets. She lives in New York but travels widely for poetry. Photo credit: Sue Rissberger. Author website.
Featured Book
Cynthia Manick Book
Irina Mashinski

Irina Mashinski

Irina Mashinski is the author of The Naked World and Giornata and of eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). Born in Moscow, she graduated from Moscow University with a Ph.D. in Paleogeography and moved to the US in 1991, where she taught high school mathematics, as well as history and meteorology at several universities. Her work appears in Poetry International, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. With Boris Dralyuk, Irina won the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize. She lives in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Author website.

Featured Book
Irina Mashinski Book
Matt Miller

Matt W. Miller

Matt W. Miller is the author of Tender the River, finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award, and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, and Club Icarus, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner. He was a winner of Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Poetry by The Sea Sonnet Sequence Contest, the River Styx Micro-fiction Prize, the Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he teaches and coaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Photo credit: Mike Weinhold. Author website.
Featured Book
Matt W Miller Book
Bob Moore

Bob Moore

Bob Moore has been writing poetry and songs since the early 1990s. His latest of three books of poetry is Body and Soul (Beech River Books, 2018). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Lyric, Muddy River Poetry Review, Quill & Parchment, and Piscataqua Poems Anthology (Piscataqua Press). In the last five years, Moore started to explore his interests in photography. In November he had two photographs accepted in the fall 2023 issue of the online journal, Smoky Quartz. Moore has lived in New Hampshire since 1984 and is a retired science teacher. Photo credit: Pat Frizella. Powow member page. Author, photography website.
Featured Book
Bob Moore Book
January Gill O'Neil

January Gill O’Neil

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She lives in Beverly, MA. Photo credit: John Andrews. Author website.
Featured Book
January Gill O'Neil
Anna V.Q. Ross

Anna V.Q. Ross

Anna V.Q. Ross’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick, won the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and the 2023 Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry. Her other collections include If a Storm (winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize) and the chapbooks Figuring and Hawk Weather. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers, and Vermont Studio Center, and her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Salamander, Anna teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative. Author website.

Featured Book
Anna V.Q. Ross Book
Priscilla Turner Spada

Priscilla Turner Spada

Priscilla Turner Spada, a Powow River Poet, and a co-organizer, host and book-sales manager for the Powow reading series, will read from her chapbook Light in Unopened Windows (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry appears regularly in Ibbetson Street, Quill & Parchment, and in several anthologies: Merrimac Mic; Word Play (with artwork); and What is Home? (Portsmouth, NH Poet Laureate Project). Also an artist—having won prizes for ekphrastic poetry—she trained at the Museum School, Boston, MA. She’s had a glass bead / jewelry making business for over 20 years, with work seen in Lark Books, etc. She lives in Newburyport, MA. Powow member page.
Featured Book
Priscilla Turner Spada Book
Paulette Demers Turco

Paulette Demers Turco

Paulette Demers Turco’s new book, Shimmer, hailed by Leslie Monsour as “superb. . . a gorgeous little volume,” collects her ekphrastic poetry and art. A Powow River Poet since 2018, Turco is editor of The Powow River Poets Anthology II, and a co-organizer and host of Powow River Poets monthly poetry readings. Her poetry appears in The Lyric, Ibbetson Street, The Poetry Porch, Quill & Parchment, Loch Raven Review, Mezzo Cammin, and others. Her chapbook In Silence was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. Awards include the Robert Frost Poetry Award; commendation in the 2020 Hippocrates Award Anthology; First Place in the Rockport 2019 Ekphrastic Poetry Contest; and MFA in Writing President’s Award from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Newburyport Art Association and appears in Quill & Parchment, where she served as the featured artist. She is retired from a career in academic and clinical optometry and lives in Newburyport. Visit her at paulettedemersturco.com.
Featured Book
Paulette Demers Turco