Salem has a long, distinguished literary history that continues today. This special event will allow you to sample the writing of several published authors who are members of the Athenaeum or North Shore residents — the prose and verse of your talented neighbors.
Cozy up to your computer with a warm cup of something and get a taste of their work, explore their books, talk writing.
This event will be on Zoom.*
We are excited to announce the authors who will be reading on December 13:
Laurette Folk
Joey Gould
Jane Healey
Aly Pierce
Sylvia Sellers-Garcia
About the Writers*
Laurette Folk’s fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Waxwing, Gravel, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Boston Globe Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Her second novel, The End of Aphrodite, is published by Bordighera Press/CUNY and is described by Kirkus Reviews as “[A] haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.” Laurette is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program. Her website is www.laurettefolk.com
Joey Gould (they/them), a non-binary writing tutor, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review). Twice nominated for Bettering American Poetry and once for a Pushcart Prize, Joey’s work has appeared in Bad Pony, The Compassion Anthology, Memoir Mixtapes, & Glass: A journal of Poetry. A long-time event organizer at Mass Poetry, they help to plan & execute poetry events at Salem Arts Festival. They also write 100-word reviews as poetry editor for Drunk Monkeys.
When her daughters were born, Jane Healey left a career in high tech to become a freelance writer. Her passion for historical fiction became her new career when her first novel, The Saturday Evening Girls Club, was published in 2017. With the release of The Beantown Girls in 2019, she continued to fulfill her dream of writing lesser known stories of women in history. Her upcoming novel The Secret Stealers, based on the true stories of the women of the Office of Strategic Services, (precursor to the CIA, during WW II) releases in March 2021. Jane lives north of Boston with two teen daughters, two idiotic cats and one amazing husband. She likes reading, running, cooking, going to the beach and drinking lots of coffee. Her website is www.janehealey.com
Aly Pierce lives in Beverly, MA where she drinks coffee and mails you records from Deathwish Inc. Her debut collection The Visible Planets and her new chapbook Cryptids are both available now from Game Over Books and Ginger Bug Press respectively.
Sylvia Sellers-García is an Associate Professor of colonial Latin American history at Boston College. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and an MPhil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her books include When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, a novel published by Riverhead, and The Woman on the Windowsill, an archival true crime book published by Yale University Press. Her current research focuses on criminal cases from the Archivo General de Centroamérica in Guatemala City.
*Jessica Treadway is unable to join us as planned. We hope to have her at another event!
*For Zoom events, registration closes 30 minutes before event start.
Zoom logins are sent 15 minutes before event start.