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Born in Lowell, poet Matt W. Miller has published several award-winning collections of poetry. He lives with his family in southern New Hampshire. The prestigious journal Tupelo Quarterly features new work by Matt in the current issue. Here’s the link to the page (note the small arrows to advance to…
Read More »This prose poem appears in my book What Is the City? (2006), which is out of print but sometimes available in used condition on internet sites. Jackie Brady was a champion boxer in Lowell, Mass., in the 1960s. The local scene from the 1980s described here predates the easing of…
Read More »New poem with Lowell setting in the latest issue of The Café Review in Portland, Maine, which has been around for a long time. I have three poems in this issue, and have been in the magazine previously. Kudos to them for keeping the magazine alive. The CR has interviews,…
Read More »This article, slightly revised, appeared first in Merrimack Valley Magazine in December 2021 when Covid had become part of daily life. Invited to write a piece about holiday time in the area, I dialed back to my childhood and later college years when downtown Lowell was a magnet for people…
Read More »Our longtime contributor Chath pierSath, writer and painter, is featured in the current issue of the prestigious “New England Review” with collaborator Seán Carlson. In the category of “Testimonies,” the duo has “Painting the Last Photograph: Art and Memory After Genocide.” Chath and Seán are organizing a…
Read More »Poet Tom Sexton (photo by Kevin Harkins) Thanks to Michael Burwell of Alaska for sending us two recent commentaries on the late Tom Sexton and his final book of poems, “Dark Cloud in Isabel Pass” (Loom Press, 2025). Michael’s review-essay appears in “Cirque” literary magazine of Alaska and Nancy Lord’s…
Read More »Bottled Milk My family moved from a declining factory city to a rural town in 1956, from Lowell, where the ancestors had been since 1880, to nearby Dracut, Mass. The communities were established in 1826 and 1701, respectively. The English colonists had been in the area since the early 1650s.…
Read More »Pollard Memorial Library hosted the 4th annual Elinor Lipman Award for Writing on Oct. 30, 2025, announcing that UMass Lowell student Julia Magee won the award including a $1000 prize for a work of short fiction. From Westford, Mass., Julia is an English major at UML studying creative writing this…
Read More »Mars Mania in America Enjoyable throughout. Full of fun facts. A Lowell book you will go back to. Who knew the size of Mars Mania? “There’s always a Lowell connection” (Marie Sweeney quote). For the past two weeks I’ve been reading a new book by science writer David Baron called…
Read More »Pulled from an old notebook, here’s a “Time Tunnel” account of a random train ride from Lowell to Boston about 30 years ago. — PM Lowell Line (1994) A long train slides through the Thorndike Street station as I wait for the 9:07 a.m. run to Boston. Doing an errand…
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