Save the Date: May 22 for New Books with Lowell Links

Loom Press on May 22 will release three new books by authors with connections to Lowell.

“The Big Move: Immigrant Voices from a Mill City” is a collection of interviews of people living and working in Lowell who have compelling stories about their roots far away and their experiences getting to America and becoming part of society here. The authors are Bob Forrant, familiar to our regular readers, and Christoph Strobel, both of the UMass Lowell History Department. This book puts humanity into the demographics of Lowell. Who are our neighbors and co-workers? What are the shared experiences of people from long-standing and newcomer groups? Lowell is a world community, a global city, and Forrant & Strobel update the case. Three of the people featured in the book will read from their stories.

Paul Hudon is better known in the Merrimack Valley as a teacher, historian, and regionalist, but he will add “poet” to his credentials when “All in Good Time” lands in readers’ hands. Dr Hudon, an occasional contributor to this blog, wrote a poem a day, short or long or medium-sized, for 12 months between 2005 and 2006. His book is a collection of poems, a journal, a series of literary sneezes, a symphony of observation, a stand-up/sit-down routine of commentary, a tour of his brain, a meditation in the spirit of Thoreau on his Walden stump—all of these and more. From a perch above Pawtucket Falls he gives us news of the universe.

Kate Hanson Foster comes from a long line of Greater Merrimack Valley poets, the first being Anne Bradstreet of North Andover, close to where Kate grew up in Andover, and the most recent being the slammers who show up to say their poems some nights at Brew’d Awakening coffee shop on Market Street. She made her own literary niche somewhere among Mistress Bradstreet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, and the young Ann Sexton who attended Rogers Hall. Kate’s voice is all her own, and in her book “Mid Drift” you hear the “varied carols” of a gritty and graceful American choir that Walt Whitman first urged us to pay attention to. Kate is a graduate of UMass Lowell and Bennington College and will be familiar to some readers as co-editor of the important but short-lived “Renovation Journal” of Lowell.

Meet the authors, get the books, enjoy the launch on Sunday, May 22, 2 to 4 pm, at O’Leary Library auditorium, Room 222, UMass Lowell South Campus, 61 Wilder Street.