Salem has a long, distinguished literary history that continues today. This special event will allow you to sample the writing of several authors who are members of the Athenaeum or North Shore residents — the prose and verse of your talented neighbors. Join us to get a taste of their work, explore their books, talk writing. Here are the writers who will read tonight:
Kathleen Aguero has published six books of poetry, her most recent being World Happiness Index from Tiger Bark Press. She has also co-edited three volumes of multi-cultural literature for the University of Georgia Press. She teaches in the Solstice low-residency M.F.A. program and in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program, and is a consulting poetry editor at Kenyon Review.
Carl Carlsen taught English at North Shore Community College for 3/8 of a century. In retirement, he has completed an oral history of his father’s fifty years at sea and his mother’s family’s flight from Nazi Germany. Last year, he self-published Brickyard Stories 2.0: A Lynn Neighborhood Before and After Urban Renewal.
Claire Keyes has published two books of poetry: The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do and the chapbook One Port. She received a grant in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship. Professor emerita at Salem State University, she lives in Marblehead where she conducts a monthly poetry salon.
Marc Levy’s work has appeared in New Millennium Writings, Chiron Review, CutThroat, CounterPunch, Queen’s Quarterly and elsewhere. It is forthcoming in The Westchester Review and Adelaide Literary Magazine. He won the 2016 Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families Writing Award. His website is Medic in the Green Time.
Dawn Paul is the author of the novel The Country of Loneliness and What We Still Don’t Know, poems on scientist Carl Linnaeus. She has been awarded writing residencies at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference and Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories.
Matthew Phillion is the author of the Indestructibles, a YA superhero novel series, its spinoff Echo and the Sea, and the Dungeon Crawlers novella series. He was the lead writer for the opioid awareness education stage play Stories of Substance. A former filmmaker, Matthew wrote and directed the feature film Certainly Never, and is a journalist and writer with a background in healthcare quality and cybersecurity.
Diana Norma Szokolyai is the author/editor of three books, with poetry recently published in Critical Romani Studies and The Poetry Miscellany. She teaches at Salem State University and Harborlight Montessori. She is the co-founder/co-director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and Chagall Performance Art Collaborative, based on Artists’ Row in Salem, MA.