Susan April: The Writing Adds Up I’m interested in what writers do to make a living while they do their best to create high quality poems, fiction, plays, and works of nonfiction. Very few literary writers are employed full-time at the keyboard. Journalists, technical writers in business, advertising copywriters, and…
Live Poetry in Lowell by Janet Egan and Paul Marion Lowell has been long-famous for Golden Gloves boxing matches at the Memorial Auditorium, but there’s a different competition for which the city has become well known. Every first and third Tuesday of the month, writers and their audience get together…
Kassie Dickinson Rubico and Resi Polixa: On Their Writing Trails Our series of year-end updates on writers from the area continues with a past contributor to the blog and a writer who is new to our publication. We’ve had an enthusiastic response to the series both in this space and…
Matt Kraunelis & the Grey Court Poets of Methuen Matt Kraunelis believes in the power of poetry to make a community more vibrant. I’ve known Matt since his days as a founding member of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence, which has brought poets like Seamus Heaney and Robert Pinsky…
Meg Smith: Writer in Full Stride Meg Smith is in full stride as a writer. She says 2018 has been “a full and blessed” year. She published her book This Scarlet Dancing (Emu Press) and placed poems and short fiction in several literary magazines and journals, including Café Review, The Literary Hatchet, Strange…
Picking up the thread for our series of updates on writers linked to Lowell and the region. David Daniel: New Books, Flash Fiction I can’t say I discovered David Daniel in the Samuel de Champlain sense, but I found out about him through his novels, particularly The Heaven Stone (1994)…
In Lowell literary history, the back-of-the-envelope version used to highlight Lucy Larcom, the women writers of the Lowell Offering magazine, and Jack Kerouac, along with legendary visits by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and H. D. Thoreau. That envelope has more names now. In our time, many…
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…
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…