April 2025 Participants
Featured Author J. Courtney Sullivan
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J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints for All Occasions, and Friends and Strangers. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Sullivan’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, New York, Real Simple, and O: The Magazine, among many other publications. In 2017, she wrote the forewords to new editions of two of her favorite classic novels–Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.
Featured Author Dr. Tiya Miles
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Dr. Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest work is the biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. She has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.
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Keith O'Brien is an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of four books, including Charlie Hustle, a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024. He lives in Lee, New Hampshire, with his wife, two kids, and two rescue dogs.
Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist. He is author of the forthcoming book, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State and his 2022 debut, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. A professor at Northeastern University and writer for The New York Times Magazine, his work also has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Guardian, among other publications. He lives near Boston.
Jacquelyn Benson is the author of feminist, anti-imperialist fantasy novels that put the weird back into history, including Empire of Shadows and The Fire in the Glass. She once lived in a museum, wrote a master’s thesis on the cultural anthropology of paranormal investigation, and received a gold medal for being clever. When not writing, she enjoys the company of a tall, dark, and handsome English teacher and practices unintentional magic.
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Lyra Selene was born under a full moon and has never quite managed to wipe the moonlight out of her eyes. She grew up on a steady diet of mythology, folklore, and fantasy, and now writes tall tales of twisted magic, forbidden romance, and brooding landscapes.
Lyra lives in New England with her husband and daughter, in an antique farmhouse that probably isn’t haunted. She is the author of the young adult duology AMBER & DUSK, and the adult Fair Folk trilogy including A FEATHER SO BLACK and A CROWN SO SILVER.
In addition to being a two-time winner of her town's annual pie contest, Laura J. Mayo is also a fantasy writer. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, their two kids, two ball pythons named Smoky and Yara, and a leopard gecko named Drake. Unsurprisingly, many of Laura's other interests are solitary, including reading, sewing, cooking, baking, admiring her air plant collection, and getting figuratively lost in deep, dark woods. How to Summon a Fairy Godmother is her debut novel.
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.
K. Iver was born in Mississippi. Their debut collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions, selected by Tyehimba Jess. Short Film won the Wisconsin Literary Award, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Awards. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University.
Cate Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award Recipient, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.
Nathan McClain (he/him) is the author of two collections of poetry: Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and Scale (Four Way Books, 2017). He is a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a Cave Canem fellow. He earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His poems and prose have appeared in Plume Poetry 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
JANE BROX‘s In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy (Godine, 2024) brings together her first three books: Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in nonfiction; Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Clearing Land. She is also the author of Silence, selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review, and Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, which was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine.
Brox has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, The Georgia Review and NewYorker.com. She has been awarded grants from the John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
Alexandra A. Chan's latest book is In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic, a sparkling, transcendent exploration of family, loss, redemption, and finding home. She is also the author of Slavery in the Age of Reason: Archaeology at a New England Farm, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters about the archaeology of northern slavery and questions of race, place, identity, and becoming.
As a mom, an archaeologist, an award-winning photographer, a painter, and an author, the question might arise, "What ties it all together?" And the answer is story. Whether digging with a trowel, wielding a camera or a paintbrush, or writing words on a page, she is only ever watching people, searching for beauty and meaning in unusual places, and telling stories. At the end of the day, story is the through-line.
She continues to be an avid traveler and collector of “lucky nuts” and to walk, garden, paint, write, stitch, build, and dream herself into ever gentler and more creative ways of being alive and human. She lives with her husband, her two sons, and their menagerie of animals in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Renay Allen self-published a series of local cozy mysteries under the pen name RM Allen. The historical-fiction books were targeted towards citizens of Exeter to help them meet some Black citizens of Exeter's past. She donates profits from the books to establish physical reminders of that community, such as the new Black Heritage Trail of NH stone marker at the head of Swasey Parkway and the "Pvt. Jude Hall" granite step at the American Independence Museum. See more of what she is up to today at www.RM-Allen.com
Justin Corriss a Certified Sommelier, author, and bartender living in New Hampshire. He graduated from Stetson University with a degree in History and promptly began working in the wine industry in North Carolina before returning to New Hampshire and beginning work in restaurants. He was the Front of House Manager for the now-closed Raleigh Wine Bar + Eatery in Portsmouth, and currently works as the General Manager at Vino e Vivo in Exeter.
As an adopted person of color, he seeks to explore questions of identity, worldview, belonging, and place through writing, and as a lover of food and drink, he desires an exploration of all the things that make living worthwhile—especially the small moments.
He began seriously pursuing novel writing in college and has self-published several fantasy novels, including the ongoing "Freedom and Control" series. He also writes poetry, and has had one short story published in "The Ana"—his first paid work.
His first play, "Skazki: A Spell of Ice and Snow” will premier at the Boston Center for the Arts in April, 2025.
Sara North is a New England native who often dreams of Paris. While books held her heart first, Sara’s training included writing and story development for both film and television scripts and fueled her desire to create with heart. With a passion to cheer on creatives and writers across art forms and industries, Sara recognizes the power of stories to bring healing, hope, and happiness.
When she’s not writing books to build a dream on, her loves include 90s rom-coms, Old Hollywood films, Hallmark Christmas movies, beloved sitcoms, music to match her mood, café hopping, baking, eating chocolate, and celebrating all things fall.
Cynthia (Cindy) L. Copeland is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author/illustrator of more than 30 books for adults and children, including her highly praised graphic memoir, CUB. She’s sold over a million books that have been translated into eight languages.
Her most recent graphic novel for young readers, DRIVE, is told in two timelines, one past and one present day. In the past, real-life race car driver Janet Guthrie is making history as the first woman to compete in the Indy 500; in the present, a fictional 12-year old character named Alex is teaching herself how to restore an old car she found in her grandfather’s barn, guided by her favorite YouTube mechanic, Faith. DRIVE follows the unpredictable journeys of these “car girls” as they pursue their passions-- overcoming obstacles, taking advantage of opportunities, and finding unexpected allies along the way… Until the remarkable moment their stories intersect.
Cindy lives in Connecticut with her family.
A lifelong Exeter resident, Dan Provost teaches and advises the Student Senate at Exeter High School. He is a member of the Exeter Rec Advisory Board as well as a coach and board member for Exeter Junior Baseball and Softball. Dan has twice been named the New Hampshire Association of Student Council’s Advisor of the Year, and in 2023 was honored as an SAU16 “Leader to Learn From.” Last summer, Dan’s 10u All Star baseball team was 1-1 in games umpired by Keith O’Brien.
Lara Bricker is an award-winning journalist, podcaster, licensed private investigator, certified cat detective and true crime author. She is one of four crime writers on the hit podcast, Crime Writers On and the author of the true crime book Lie after Lie: The True Story of a Master of Deception, Betrayal, and Murder.
Dead on Deadline and The Final Curtain, the first two books in the Piper Greene Exeter mystery series, were the best sellers of the year at Water Street Bookstore in 2021 and 2022.
Lara lives in Exeter, where she can often be found walking around Exeter pondering where her next local murder mystery will take place. www.larabricker.com