Don’t miss the book release party for three new books from Loom Press by writers with strong Lowell connections who have created books with strong Lowell content. The event is Sunday, May 22, 2 pm, at O’Leary Library auditorium, Room 222, 61 Wilder St., on UMass Lowell’s South Campus. Everyone is welcome to attend. There will be brief readings from the books and a book-signing with the authors.

“The Big Move” by UMass Lowell history professors Bob Forrant and Christoph Strobel features interviews with nine Lowellians whose lives are models of the immigrant or refugee experience in the United States. Phala Chea, Gordon Halm, Muriel “Mimi” Parseghian, and the others are our friends, neighbors, and colleagues whose presence in the community makes Lowell a global city. The oral histories were conducted as part of a major ethnographic study funded by Lowell National Historical Park.

Kate Hanson Foster’s first book of poems, “Mid Drift,” according to the notable poet Amy Gerstler, “captures the arresting sense of how loss scrapes away layers of one’s personhood exposing a quiet resilience, maybe even a rising faith, that glimmers dimly underneath abiding grief like some kind of ore. Never florid, the life-sized tragedies here are minutely controlled in the telling, and move with meticulous grace.” — That is high praise. And well-deserved praise. Poet Major Jackson, one of her teachers in the Bennington Writing Seminars, commented: “Consider yourself lucky to read her poems.”

Paul Hudon wrote 365 poems between September 27, 2005, and September 26, 2006. They turned into a book that maps the interior and exterior worlds of a historian-poet-regionalist camped on high ground above Pawtucket Falls. This isn’t a journal, but it could be. This isn’t a stand-up routine, but some of it could be. This isn’t cultural geography, but it could be. You have to encounter it to make of it what you will. Paul is the author of the coffee table-sized illusrated history of the Merrimack Valley called “The Valley & Its Peoples” that was published in two versions over the years.