• Tuesday, April 1st at 4:30pm (Talk)

Alan Weisman will talk in the Pruyne Lecture Hall, Fayerweather Hall, Amherst College, about his new book, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, which has been short listed for a Los Angeles Times science & technology book prize   Weisman’s previous books include, The World Without Us , which describes a post-human scenario of the planet, & Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, which won the Social Inventions Award from the Global Ideas Bank.

• Wednesday, April 2nd at 8:00pm (Poetry reading)

J.D. McClatchy will read from his new volume of poetry, Plundered Hearts: New & Selected Poems.   He has authored at least six collections of poetry, the fifth of which, Hazmat, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.   He has also written texts for musical settings, including ten opera libretti.   Winner of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters (1991), he has also been one of the New York Public Literary Lions, & received the 2000 Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Thursday, April 3rd at 7:00pm(Poetry reading)

"Anne Halley Poetry Prize Reading"   Geffrey Davis, winner of the 10th annual Anne Halley Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Massachusetts Review, will read from his prize-winning work.    

The Anne Halley Poetry Prize is named in memorial for Anne Halley, to honor her 25 years of work as poetry co-editor of the Massachusetts Review as well as her work as a poet & writer.   Her last collection of poetry, Rumors of the Turning Wheel, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2003.

• Monday, April 7th at 4:00pm (Book launch party)

Join Jerry Mileur, professor emeritus in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, in celebrating the publication of his new book Stars Are Back: The St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, & Player Unrest in 1946.   The former owner of a minor league baseball team, Mileur is author or coeditor of nine books, including High-Flying Birds—about the 1942 St. Louis Cardinals.

• Wednesday, April 9th at 8:00pm(Reading)

Joan Silber will read from her recent novel, Fools.   Silber is the author of Household Words, which won a PEN/Hemingway Award, & Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, which was a finalist for both the 2004 National Book Award & the Story Prize.   She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts & the New York Foundation for the Arts.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Thursday, April 10th at 6:00pm(Award)

Norton Juster & Amherst Books, represented by owners Nat Herold & Mark Wootton, will receive the Jones Library’s first annual Samuel Minot Jones Awards for Literary Achievement at the Yiddish Book Center on the Hampshire College campus, Amherst.   The event doubles as a part of a capital investment campaign for the Jones Library.   Each attendee will received a signed, numbered print of Sammy the Owl by acclaimed illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi.   For more information, go here.

• Thursday, April 10th at 8:00pm(Poetry reading)

Peter Gizzi will read at Memorial Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as part of the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series from his new collection of poetry, In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011   Gizzi, who teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Poets & Writers here at the University of Massachusetts, is author Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape & Weather, Artificial Heart, & Periplum.   He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, & artist books.  

• Sunday, April 13th at 3:00pm (Poetry reading)

jubilat/Jones Reading Series at the Jones Library, Amherst.   The reading will feature poets Rod Smith & Hannah Brooks-Motl.   Meet the poets at an informal Q & A session that will follow the reading.   For more information go to jubilat/Jones Reading Series on Facebook.

• Wednesday, April 16th at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Ron Welburn will read from his collection of poetry, Council Decisions.   Welburn is a professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst & is the Director of the Certificate program in Native American Studies.   Author of six volumes of poetry, & several volumes of essays, a former editor of The Grackle, he has been a regular contributor to JazzTimes magazine.   Welburn was formally coordinator of the Jazz Oral History Project for the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.

• Tuesday, April 22nd at 7:00pm (Reading)

Michael Ponsor, a senior judge on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, will read from his new thriller, The Hanging Judge.   Based on the experience of the author, a federal judge who in 2000 presided over the first capital case in Massachusetts in more than fifty years, this extraordinary debut thriller offers an unprecedented inside view of a federal death penalty trial.

When a drive-by shooting in Holyoke, Massachusetts, claims the lives of a Puerto Rican drug dealer & a nurse at a neighborhood clinic, the police arrest a black drug dealer.   With no death penalty in Massachusetts, the US attorney shifts the double homicide out of state jurisdiction into federal court so that he can pursue the death penalty.   The Honorable David S. Norcross, who has been on the federal bench only two years, now presides over the first death penalty case in the state in fifty years.   He must contend not only with an ambitious female prosecutor & a brilliant veteran defense attorney, but with a citizenry outraged at the senseless killing of a white hockey mom—not to mention the pressures of the media, anti-death penalty protesters, vengeful gang members, & the million other things that can go wrong in a capital trial.

Michael A. Ponsor takes readers into the courtroom & beyond, presenting with great sensitivity the points of view of the defendant & his wife; the victims’ families; law enforcement officers; witnesses; & the judge who, while still coming to terms with the death of his wife, begins a relationship with a woman he is not sure he can trust.

Presented in conjunction with the Harvard Club of Western Massachusetts & the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard.

• Thursday, April 24th at 8:00pm(Poetry reading)

CANCELEDPoet Charles Wright will read at Memorial Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from his recent collection of poetry, Caribou.   Wright, who has published numerous collections of poetry, & several volumes of essays, shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems & won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.   His translation of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm & Other Poems won him the PEN Translation Prize in 1979/   Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series.

• Friday, April 25th at 4:00pm (Poetry reading)

Piotr Sommer will read.   Sommer is a poet & translator of English, Irish, & American poetry.   He is editor for Literatura na Świecie, a magazine of international writing.   John Ashbery has said about Sommer’s poetry, “Piotr Sommer is the great poet of ‘everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps.’   Like Frank O’Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls ‘improper names’—the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt & taciturn world that surrounds us.”

• Wednesday, April 30th at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

David Bartone will read from his new collection of poetry, Practice on Mountains.  Bartone, who recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts M.F.A. Program, is winner of 2013 Sawtoorth Poetry Prize.   Dan Beachy-Quick said of Practice on Mountains that “it’s wonderfully self-searching without being narcissistic, tied into love’s agonies in ways familiar but strikingly honest, deprecating but audacious, learned but humble.“