The long-awaited outside audit by the firm of Clifton Larson Allen of the Lowell Public Schools was released late Friday night and according to an Elizabeth Dobbins story in the Lowell Sun (“Audit confirms Lowell schools’ fiscal quagmire”) it is a devastating indictment of fiscal mismanagement by the past school…
Steve O’Connor: Killin’ It with Short Stories Writer, teacher, and soccer-man Stephen O’Connor of Lowell has been killing it on the short story front for the past few years, placing 14 stories (six this year) in Lodestone Journal, Southern Pacific Journal, Dimeshow Review, The Sandy River Review, Ricky’s Backyard, The…
Here’s another literary update in my series about writers with links to Lowell and the region.–PM Michael Casey: Book Review, New Chapbook, More Mike Casey has been publishing his poems since the early 1970s. He’s a graduate of Lowell High School, UMass Lowell (physics, Lowell Tech), and the State University…
Febo: Choosing Joy I met Anthony Febo or Febo, as he is known professionally, (“Yes, it’s very Bono, Madonna, Seal of me,” he said when I asked his preference for a name in this update about his work.)—well, I met Febo in Lowell, Mass., when performance poetry/slam poetry/spoken word was…
Blockbuster Council Motion Tuesday Most Lowell City Council motions are noncontroversial, but every so often one with far-reaching implications is served up. Such will be the case Tuesday night when councilors take up a joint motion by Vesna Nuon and Ed Kennedy. The motion requests the City Manager to “encourage…
Jacquelyn Malone: New Poems, Broadside Contest Winner The first time I read Jacquelyn Malone’s name, it was on a list of writers who had been awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. That was around 1990, I think. She was listed as a Lowell resident who had won…
Kate Hanson Foster: NEA Fellowship, New Book Completed, & More We caught up to a busy Kate Hanson Foster on the Groton frontier, where she lives with her husband, Bert, and their three children. She reports that the garden is pulled up and they just stacked a cord of wood…
David Moloney of Lowell: Forthcoming Novel, High Praise Bloomsbury Publishing will release David Moloney’s first novel, Barker House, in February 2020. He’s a Lowell resident and graduate of UMass Lowell and Southern New Hampshire University (master’s degree in creative writing). David’s novel has earned outstanding advance notices from well-known writers.…
Dave Robinson: Writer-in-Residence, Portugal Checking in with writer, poet, and multifarious arts guy Dave Robinson, we learned that he’s back from a Writer-in-Residence gig at Cultívamos Cultura in São Luis, Portugal. He was at the arts center in a dual role with his wife and creative partner, Anna Isaak-Ross, an…
The Lowell Way By Kendall Wallace Lowell—-My grandparents came to Lowell from Prince Edward Island, Canada more than 100 years ago. Since that time, five generations of our family have called Lowell home. Earlier this year. My family was the last of the clan to leave Lowell. My wife and…