April 2026 Participants
Featured Author Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
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Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She conducts award-winning theoretical physics research on dark matter, the early universe, and neutron stars, while also researching Black feminist science studies. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and a 2022 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. A columnist for New Scientist and Physics World, she is originally from East L.A., California, and now divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Featured Author Catherine Newman
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Catherine Newman is the internationally bestselling author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, the kids’ craft book Stitch Camp, the best-selling how-to books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, the novel We All Want Impossible Things, and the novels Sandwich and Wreck, which were both instant New York Times bestsellers. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She writes the Crone Sandwich newsletter on Substack and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Durane West, spoken word artist, and educator is born and raised in Boston. He channels intense imagery, and intuitive emotional exploration to showcase transparency in his writing. Through versatile form usage and raw introspective diction. West has several years of experience working in the non-profit sector for organizations that aim to improve literacy skills for inner city youth throughout Boston. West was nominated in 2022 and 2024 for Spoken Word Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards. His poem “617”, centering the experience of a black Boston resident was featured and published for the City of Boston in 2021.
Brooke Barbier received her PhD in American history from Boston College. In 2013, she founded Ye Olde Tavern Tours, a popular outing that takes guests into historic sites and taverns to learn about Boston’s revolutionary and drunken history. She is the author of Boston in the American Revolution: A Town Versus an Empire and the award-winning King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father. Her next book, Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution, releases in June 2026 and examines the influence of alcohol on the creation of the United States.
Kabria Baumgartner is an award-winning public historian who has worked with numerous local historical organizations. In 2021, she co-founded the award-winning Newburyport Black History Initiative (NBHI), an organization that highlights and incorporates Black history into the public landscape in downtown Newburyport. In 2019, she published her first academic book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, which tells the story of Black girls and women who fought to democratize public education in the nineteenth-century Northeast. She is finishing her second book, Striving for Justice: Black Youth and Civil Rights in Boston, which explores the intellectual roots of Black youth organizing for racial justice in early Boston. She is Dean's Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Northeaster University.
Caleb Gayle is a professor at Northeastern University, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead Books). Black Moses was a finalist for the New England Book Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, among others. He is also the author of We Refuse to Forget, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, the Oklahoma Book Award, and longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award.
Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Forest Becomes Her (July 2026), The Last Beekeeper, and Waiting for the Night Song. She is the winner of the New Hampshire Book Awards' People's Choice for Best Novel, and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. Her novels have been named to Most Anticipated lists from CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others, and were selected as an Amazon Editor's Pick for Best Book of the Month. A former organic farmer, forest manager, and beekeeper, and a 2026 TEDx speaker, she is a frequent speaker on the topic of fiction in the age of climate crisis at universities, museums, and conferences, nationally and internationally. She currently serves on the teaching faculty of Drexel University's Creative Writing MFA program and is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard. When she isn't reading or writing, you can probably find Julie kayaking, skiing, swimming, gardening, or trying to track down her four children and two dogs.
Nick Fuller Googins is the author of the novels, The Frequency of Living Things and The Great Transition. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Men’s Health, The Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine, and works as an elementary school teacher. He is a member of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, as well as the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States.
Andrew Krivak is the author of five novels, two chapbooks of poetry, and two works of nonfiction. His 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and the inaugural Chautauqua Prize. He followed The Sojourn with The Signal Flame (2017), a novel The New York Times said evoked “an austere landscape, a struggling family, and a deep source of pain” in Krivak’s fictional Dardan, Pennsylvania. His third novel, The Bear (2020), received the Banff Mountain Book Prize for fiction and is a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title. Like the Appearance of Horses (2023), returns to the characters and landscape of Dardan. Of the work, Asako Serizawa observed: “Andrew Krivak’s Homeric novel is at once intimate and sweeping, expanding an epic story set into motion in The Sojourn. Tenderly attentive to all that is given and taken by war, Like the Appearance of Horses is a graceful, heroic accomplishment that speaks to the costs of duty when violence is as constant as the Pennsylvania mountains that anchor and separate this indelible family we’ve come to know so personally.” His fifth novel Mule Boy is forthcoming with Bellevue Literary Press in 2026.
As a poet, Krivak has published the chapbooks Islands (1999), and Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves (2021). He is also author of the memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (2008), and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912 (2009), which won the Louis Martz Prize for scholarly research on William Carlos Williams.
He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, an MA in philosophy from Fordham, and a PhD in literary modernism from Rutgers University. Krivak lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
He is currently the visiting lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University.
E. B. Goodale (“good” + “ale”) is an award winning illustrator, printmaker, and storyteller whose work explores themes of community, curiosity, and our inherent connectedness with nature. She has illustrated many picture books and is the author/illustrator of the “Robin’s World” series, the first of which is Robin and the Stick, in addition to The Moon Remembers, Under the Lilacs, and Also. Her first picture book Windows, written by Julia Denos, received an Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Honor. Many of her books have accumulated accolades and awards including Junior Library Gold Standards, ALA Notables, Best of lists, among others.
Since 2012, E. B. has been designing a specially branded line of stationery products for letterpress company, Smudge Ink, which are distributed worldwide. Her designs are also licensed with Postable.com and have been featured in Real Simple Magazine.
E. B. works out of Gallows Hill Artist Studios in historic Salem, Massachusetts. When she is not creating, she is wandering her local arboretum, spending time with her family, and playing fetch with her black cat named Green.
Sara Deniz Akant (she/her) is a Turkish-American educator and poet. She is the author of three books of poems, most recently Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and a NYT/ Boston Globe best book of the year), Babette (Rescue Press 2015), winner of Rescue Press’ Black Box Poetry Prize, and Parades (Omnidawn 2014), winner of the Omnidawn Chapbook Prize. She teaches poetry as Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, helps to run the Kan Yama Kan reading series in Brooklyn, and is related to Dracula (by marriage).
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Myles Taylor (they/he) is a Boston-based transmasculine writer, organizer, educator, Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, and glitter enthusiast. They are the current curator of the historic Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge and former President of the Emerson Poetry Project. They have been performing and representing Boston at slam tournaments and festivals internationally for over a decade. Their debut collection, Masculinity Parable (Game Over Books, 2023) was shortlisted for the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. Their publications can be found at myles-taylor.com, and their neuroses can be found @mylesdoespoems. They live amongst the rats of Allston, MA.