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Sarah Alcott Anderson

Sarah Alcott Anderson holds a BA in English from Skidmore College and an MFA in poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Raleigh Review, December Magazine, and other journals. A high school teacher for eighteen years, she chairs the English Department at Berwick Academy in southern Maine. With her husband and two children, she runs The Word Barn, a gathering space in New Hampshire for literary and musical events, including writing workshops and her reading series, The Silo Series.

Books

We Hold On To What We Can: Poems

 
 
Authors Alfred Bouchard

Alfred Bouchard

This is Alfred Bouchard's first book of poems. He is a member of the Lowell Poetry Network and has read his work at the Parker Gallery of the Whistler House Museum of Art, 119 Gallery in Lowell, and other locations.

Poet Kate Hanson writes: "Alfred Bouchard's poems in The Fogg are passionate ruminations in a museum where 'no church bells ring' and 'perfection is frightening.' Bouchard extracts from the silent canvas the strange exhausted unsaid–those clouds that live between the image and the words." 

Books

The Fogg: Poems

 
 
Author Michael Casey

Michael Casey

Michael Casey is from Lowell, Massachusetts, and attended the public schools in that city. He received a B.S. degree in physics in 1968 from University of Massachusetts-Lowell, where poet William Aiken taught the modern poetry course.

Drafted that year, Casey became a military policeman in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and later in Landing Zone Bayonet, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam, with the Americal Division. The journal of his military experience became the book,Obscenities, published in 1972 by the Yale University Press. His book, Millrat, on blue collar work in a textile mill dye house has been published by Adastra Press. Casey taught for many years at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Books

 
 

Ann Chandonnet

The oldest of five children, Ann Fox Chandonnet was born in Lowell, Mass., growing up in a the neighboring rural town of Dracut. She attended Lowell State College (as it was then) as an English major/history minor, class of 1964, graduating magna cum laude.

She earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and then accepted a position as an English teacher at Kodiak High School in Alaska. After a year on Kodiak Island, she returned to Lowell and became a teaching assistant at Lowell State for three years.

 In 1969 she and her husband, Fernand L. Chandonnet, moved to Oakland, Calif., where she learned banking at one bank and then was hired away by a second, First Enterprise Bank, the first Black-owned bank in the city, to be administrative assistant to the President. She also published her first cookbook, The Complete Fruit Cookbook (101 Productions, San Francisco).

The couple adopted their first child, Yves Gaetan, ten days old, in Costa Rica in 1972. Fern was hired by radio station KHAR in Anchorage to be its “morning man” (a combination news reader and comedian) in 1973.

 In 1974, they adopted their second son, Alexandre Jules. Ann remained at home for ten years to raise the boys while carving out time for words. She then spent ten years as a reporter for The Anchorage Times, moving in 1999 to Juneau to work for the Juneau Empire.

 Among her honors is an award from The Alaska Press Club for a seven-part series, “Disabled by Alcohol Before Birth.” Her long poem “In Velvet” was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Her latest book is a children’s book, Baby Abe: A Lullaby for Lincoln (Circles Press, 2021).

Books

 
 

David Daniel

David Daniel was born in Boston, Mass., and grew up in Weymouth. He studied variously at Eastern Nazarene College, the University of Maine, and the University of Oregon.

Drafted, he served in the Army as a journalist. Beginning in his early 20s he traveled widely, spending time in over twenty countries, and worked at more a dozen jobs. These include clamdigger, tennis instructor, carpenter, and brain slicer in the neuropathology lab at Harvard Medical School, all of which he considers valuable experience for writing and for teaching, which became a paired profession. He taught literature and writing at several colleges and universities and capped his teaching career working at an inner-city charter high school for at-risk students. He is a volunteer on several boards and a contributor to the Arts Fuse, the RichardHowe.com Blog, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Merrimack Valley. He can be reached at daviddaniel67@gmail.com.

Books

Beach Town Stories

 
 
Authors - Judith Dickerman-Nelson

Judith Dickerman-Nelson

Judith Dickerman-Nelson is a graduate of UMass Lowell and Emerson College. She has taught writing at the high school and college levels and has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center.

For 15 years, she worked at the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, Massachusetts, where her love for the Cambodian community grew. She has traveled to Cambodia, studied and performed traditional Cambodian dance, and begun to learn the Khmer language. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Spirits Dancing Into Light is her first book of poems. A bilingual edition, the translations are by Boroeuth Brian Chen of Lowell. Her memoir/novel, Believe in Me: A Teen Mom’s Story, was published by Jefferson Park Press in 2012. She lives in southern Vermont with her husband and has two grown sons.

Books

Spirits Dancing Into Light

 
 
Author Dennis DiZoglio

Dennis DiZoglio

Dennis DiZoglio was elected Mayor of Methuen, Mass., in 1993 with 74 percent of the vote, and reelected in 1995 and 1997 with 84 and 80 percent of the vote, respectively. He went on to become a Deputy General Manager with the MBTA, the fifth largest transit authority in the U.S., and the Executive Director of the Merrimack Valley Planning Commission, an agency serving more than 335,000 people.

 
 
Scott Francis

Scott Francis

Scott Francis received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he was a Regents Fellow. He went on to teach in Jinzhou, China from 1986 to 1989. In 1989 he moved to Kyoto, Japan and taught there, staying for sixteen years. His peregrinations after his return to the United States ended up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he works for the public school system.

 
 
Authors - Forrant & Strobel

Robert Forrant & Christoph Strobel

Robert Forrant and Christoph Strobel, under contract to Lowell National Historical Park, defined, researched and created an ethnographic overview of immigrant communities, past and present, in Lowell, Massachusetts. The Big Move features a selection of the thirty-five oral histories they compiled for the larger study. Emblematic of Lowell's diverse population, the oral histories in The Big Move provide an intensely personal perspective that brings to life the individual achievements and challenges that are representative of issues faced by their larger communities in the 21st century.

 
 
Authors - Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is a poet, publisher, and political economist living in Greater Boston, USA, with his wife Kelly, kids Theo and Estelle, and Rexroth the family dog. His recent books are Loom, Radio Plays, and And Yet it Moves. He edits spoKe, a Boston-based annual of poetry and poetics and works as a professor of global development policy at Boston University.

The Wild Goose was a hand-made magazine of verse written and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly aboard the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport British convicts to Australia.  O’Reilly (1844-1890) was an Irish Fenian sentenced to life imprisonment for infiltrating the British army and attempted mutiny.  O’Reilly escaped from Australia aboard a whaling ship and settled in Boston where he rose to become an editor of The Pilot, a noted poet, and abolitionist. 

In a sense, these poems are a little magazine conceived of and drafted in 2018 and 2019 when Gallagher was a poet-in-residence at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland.  In addition to a sequence on O’Reilly, the poems in this book engage the Irish landscape, and the history and myth that formed the identity of some of the Gallagher’s ancestors until British colonialism and associated famine took them to Massachusetts.

Books

The Wild Goose

 
 

Charlie Gargiulo

Charlie Gargiulo in Lowell, 2023 (photograph by Kevin Harkins)

He grew up in Dracut and Lowell, Mass., served in the military, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

He founded the Coalition for a Better Acre, a nationally recognized community development group. The International Institute in Lowell honored him as one of the 100 most important leaders in Lowell history who have worked on behalf of immigrants.

He lives outside of Boston.

Books

Legends of Little Canada

 
 
Authors - Thomas Fredereick Mofford

Thomas Frederick Mofford

Thomas Frederick Mofford (1931-2016) received a degree from Tufts University and pursued graduate studies at Boston University, Boston State College and Simmons College. Tom's poetry appeared in numerous publications, but has not been collected until now.

He believed poetry was meant to be performed  and often presented his own in front of audiences. Married to author-historian Juliet Haines Mofford for 60  years, they traveled from the West Indies to Japan and Spain with their children, teaching and engaging other cultures. He developed a pilot program in media literacy and film studies at Andover High School and was a charter member of the New England Screen Association. A curricula reviewer for Scholastic, he was also a reference librarian at Memorial Hall Library, Andover, and acted in numerous theater productions. For 20 years he taught English as a Second Language at Northern Essex Community College. 

Books

I Am the Poem

 
 
Hilary Holladay

Hilary Holladay

Hilary Holladay is a graduate of the University of Virginia with an M.A. from the College of William & Mary and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of six books and co-editor of two essay collections, she has taught at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, James Madison University, and the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography, published by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday in November 2020. She lives in Orange County, Virginia. \

With Loom Press, she published two collections of poetry, both of which are out of print but available online in used condition: Baptism in the Merrimack (poems) and The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson.

 
 
Author - James Higgins

James Higgins

Photographer, writer, and multi-media producer James Higgins is the author of the graphic novel Nether World and co-author with Joan Ross of three documentary photography books: Lowell: A Contemporary View, Southeast Asians: A New Beginning in Lowell, and Fractured Identities: Cambodia’s Children of War. His Ephemera won first prize for experimental films in the VSM Film Festival in Hollywood, Calif.

The Kingdom of Kambuja, a multi-media performance work by Flying Orb, which he co-founded with dancers from the Angkor Dance Troup, received the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Gold Star Award. In the past fifteen years, Flying Orb Productions has created stage productions and related films featuring casts of Southeast Asian actors and dancers.

Higgins’ signature work chronicling the renaissance of the historic textile mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and the notable settlement in the city of refugees from the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge genocide has assured his place as one of the premier photographers of his generation. His photographs have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, Addison Gallery of American Art, and other galleries and museums. He lives in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Books

North & South Ireland: Before Good Friday and the Celtic Tiger

 
 
Linda Hoffman

Linda Hoffman

An honors graduate of Bryn Mawr College with a degree in Fine Arts, Linda Hoffman studied at the Sorbonne and at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship after graduating from college, she trained for two years in the Noh Theater in Kyoto, Japan.

A lifelong passion for poetry converged in 1981 with her work as a graphic artist in the form of her first sculpture, a poem in cloth, launching an extensive exploration of narrative sculpture incorporating language, natural fibers, wood, stone, and found objects. In 1997, she began using old agricultural tools to create lyrical and poignant sculptures decrying New England’s vanishing agricultural landscape. Represented in museums and private collections, Hoffman has public sculptures installed in towns and cities across the region.

A contributor to WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Hoffman was a founding editor of Wild Apples, a journal of nature, art, and inquiry. She is the author of three chapbooks of art and poetry, and the letterpress art book, Winter Air, created in memory of her mother, Dr. Annette Weiner.

In 2006, five years after Hoffman and her three children moved into an old farmhouse with an abandoned orchard, Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts became the first organic pick-your-own orchard in Massachusetts. Now, with more than fifteen years of experience growing organic apples, Hoffman contributes to a holistic apple growers’ forum, teaches workshops, and is respected by an influential holistic apple growing community.

She lives with her partner, Blase, his parrot, Orco, and friends who move in for a few days, weeks, or a season who are part of the farm’s growing creative and spiritual community. A Zen Buddhist, Hoffman's dharma name Shinji means Truth in the Soil. The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir is her first book.

Books

The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir

 
 
Authors - Paul Hudon

Paul Hudon

Paul Hudon is the author of The Valley & Its Peoples: An Illustrated History of the Lower Merrimack. He is now at work on his next book, Doing History: A Step in the Only Direction You Remember Is a Step Forward. He lives and shops in Lowell.

 
 
Authors - Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord

Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord

Susan grew up in New Jersey, came to Boston for her last two years of college, and has lived in Massachusetts ever since. She’s been an artist for 38 years. She started with calligraphy and then moved into making books, slowly transitioning from books with text to wordless ones with natural materials. She is inspired by the spirit of nature, both wild and cultivated, and the beauty and power of words.

Susan's work is in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Bowdoin College, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, the University of Arizona, Wellesley College, and Yale University. It has also been featured in books (1,000 Artists Books, 500 Handmade Books, Cover to Cover, The Art of the Handmade Book, Handmade Books And Cards) and magazines (Urthona: Buddhism and the Arts, Somerset Studio, Fiberarts, Letter Arts Review, and Bound & Lettered).

Susan is known internationally for her advocacy of the educational and personal value of simple bookmaking with recycled materials through her Making Books with Children website and her Joy of Making Books videos.

Books

Art Lessons: Reflections from an Arist's Life

 
 
Eric Linder

Eric Linder

Eric Linder received his BA from the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana. After working briefly in New York City in advertising, he moved to Chelmsford, Mass., where he owned The Chelmsford Bookstore for five years. He has owned and operated Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod since 1980. He has performed his work in Boston; Lowell; and Andover, Mass; Chelan, Wash.; and on Cape Cod at various venues including Night of New Works at the Academy Playhouse in Orleans and the Cape Cod Cultural Center in Dennisport. He lives in Eastham where he recently discovered a meteorite in his back yard while digging turnips. His work has appeared in The Quarterly, Harvard Magazine, Light Year: The Annual of Light Verse and Funny Poems, Bellingham Review, and other journals and anthologies.

 
 
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Paul Marion

Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouac's early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. With Tina Neylon and John Wooding, he edited Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (2020), featuring writers from Ireland and America. His recent work has appeared in So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indiana; Café Review in Portland, Maine; PoetsReadingtheNews.org, a national online publication; SpoKe Seven, a Boston-based poetry annual; Résonance, a Franco-American journal at UMaine Orono; and Merrimack Valley Magazine. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.

Photo credit: UMass Lowell

Books

 
 

Helena Minton

Helena Minton’s previous collections include The Canal Bed with Alice James Books, The Gardener and the Bees with March Street Press, and The Raincoat Colors with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, The Listening Eye, Sou’wester, Poetry, West Branch, Nasty Women Poets, An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace. She worked for many years as the director of a public library and has also taught English Composition and Creative Writing.  She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and serves on the Board of the Robert Frost Foundation, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She lives north of Boston.

 
 
Authors - Jack Neary

Jack Neary

Jack Neary is a playwright, director and actor. His plays have been produced worldwide, and he has appeared in the films THE TOWN and BLACK MASS. His website is jacknearyonline.com.

Books

A Bang Bang Play

 
 

Stephen O’Connor

Stephen O'Connor is a writer from Lowell, Massachusetts, where much of his work is set. His previous books include, Smokestack Lightning, Stories, and the novels The Spy in the City of Books, The Witch at Rivermouth and This Is No Time to Quit Drinking.

 
 

Carla Panciera

Born in Westerly, Rhode Island, Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English and has a graduate degree in poetry from Boston University where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott.

She has published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review.

Her first collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (Pam Houston, judge) and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was chosen by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.

Ms. Panciera worked as a high school English teacher for almost thirty years. She lives with her husband, Dennis Donoghue, and their three daughters in Rowley, Mass. Find out more about this author and about life on Tum-A-Lum Farm at her blogsite: carlapanciera.wordpress.com.

Books

Barnflower

 
 
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Chath pierSath

Chath pierSath was born in Battambang, Cambodia in 1970. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in International Service and Development from World College West/New College of California in San Francisco, and a master of arts degree in Community Social Psychology from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he lived and worked for seven years after he returned to Cambodia in 1994 to volunteer in the human rights field with the Cambodian American National Development Organization.

The author of two collections of poetry, After and This Body Mystery, and a children’s book, Sinat and the Instrument of the Heart, his writing has also appeared in various publications. Known internationally for his visual art, he has shown his work in Asia, Europe, and North America. He lives and works on a family farm that grows fruits and vegetables in Bolton in the Nashoba Valley of central Massachusetts.

His poems and prose have appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Children of the Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, Consequence Magazine, Café Review, Where the Road Begins, Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, Prayers for a Thousand Years: Blessings and Expressions of Hope for the New Millennium, MagicalCambodia.com, and others.

Books

On Earth Beneath Sky

 
 
Phil Primack

Phil Primack

Phil Primack wrote for newspapers from Boston to Appalachia including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. He has taught journalism and has been a policy adviser and consultant to government agencies and non-profit organizations. He is the author of New England Country Fair.

 
 
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Dave Robinson

Dave Robinson is from Lowell, Mass. He’s dabbled in midwifery for more than one unplanned home-birth (see evidence below). He’s worked as a copy editor and has taught creative writing at juvenile detention centers as well as universities.

His poems and reviews have appeared in journals and anthologies, most notably: Renovation Journal, Entelechy International, Poetry International and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry. Robinson’s fiction, photos, art and articles have appeared in The Surfer’s Path, The Surfer’s Journal, Powder, Bike, Surfer and Eastern Surf Magazine. He appears in an award-winning short film by James Higgins (three non-speaking roles, you’ll never find him). He’s attempted stand-up comedy six times (bombed twice). His children, Griffin and Oona, were brought to you by his wife—the talented and generous artist, Anna Isaak-Ross (who dislikes parentheticals). He loves to surf, bodysurf, scuba dive and travel whenever possible.

Books

 
 
Authors - James R. Scrimgeour

James R. Scrimgeour

James R. Scrimgeour has published ten books of poetry. Jim received a bachelor's degree from Clark University and a master's and PhD from UMass-Amherst. Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University.

Photo: Brian Koonz

He has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and read widely including at an International Conference on Poetry and History in Scotland. A former editor of Connecticut Review, in 2016 he was appointed Poet Laureate of New Milford, Connecticut. Jim is the author of a critical biography of Sean O’Casey and numerous reviews and articles on poetry and drama. He lives in New Milford, Conn., with his wife, Christine Xanthakos Scrimgeour.

Books

Voices of Dogtown

 
 
Tom Sexton

Tom Sexton

Tom Sexton was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and lived in the city through his high school years. He earned degrees at Northern Essex Community College and now-Salem State University, and then pursued graduate studies at the University of Alaska, where he stayed and founded the creative writing program at the Anchorage campus. He taught there for decades and co-founded the highly respected Alaska Quarterly Review.

The author of many volumes of poetry, his most recent collections are Li Bai Rides a Dolphin Home (2018), A Ladder of Cranes (2015), and For the Sake of the Light: New and Selected Poems (2009), all from the University of Alaska Press. His Lowell books are A Clock with No Hands and Bridge Street at Dusk. Among his honors are being appointed Poet Laureate of Alaska (1995-2000) and being named a Distinguished Alumnus of Lowell High School. Tom and his wife Sharyn have lived in Alaska since 1970. Recently, they have lived part-time on the coast of Maine.

Photo by Kevin Harkins

Books

Bridge Street at Dusk
Cummiskey Alley

 
 
John Wooding

John Wooding

John Wooding is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he served as Provost for four years. On campus, he advanced interdisciplinary study and research on regional economic and social development.

With Kristin G. Esterberg, he co-authored Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Universities (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), and with Charles Levenstein co-authored The Point of Production: Work Environment in Advanced Industrial Societies (The Guilford Press, 1999). A graduate of the London School of Economics and Brandeis University, John was born in Northampton, England, and now lives in New England.

Photo by Kevin Harkins

Books

The Power of Non-Violence

 
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