• Monday, May 2nd at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Melissa Dickey & Jennifer Militello will read from recent work.   Dickey is the author The Lily Will &, most recently, Dragons.   Her poems & reviews have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Sundog Lit, & KROnline.   Militello has published in AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, among other journals.   She is author of several volumes of poetry including the recently published A Camouflage of Specimens & Garments.

• Tuesday, May 3rd at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Poets Kim Burwick & Kevin Goodan will read from recent work.   Burwick is author of Horses in the Cathedral, Has No Kinsmen, & most recently, Good Night Brother.   Her poems have been published in many literary journals & magazines including Fence, Kalliope, Barrow Street, The Indiana Review, & The Literary Review.   Goodan is author of three volumes of poetry, In the Ghost-House Acquainted, Winter Tenor, & most recently, Let the Voices.   His poems have been published in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Mid-American Poetry Review, & other journals.

• Tuesday, May 3rd at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Jim Hicks will talk at the Jones Library, Amherst, about how war has been perceived, described, & interpreted in many genres & a wide range of media from Civil War photography & poetry to modern day graphic novels & performance art.   Hicks is editor of The Massachusetts Review & author of Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer.

• Wednesday, May 4th at 7:00pm (Talk)

University of Massachusetts Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor, Katherine Newman, will talk about her new book, Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century.   Newman has written widely on the working poor, middle class economic insecurity & school violence.

• Tuesday, May 10th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Italian author Andrea Molesini will read from his new prize-winning novel, Not All Bastards Are From Vienna, which is set in a small town north of Venice during World War I.   “Based on the reminiscences of an actual” historical figure, the New York Times Book Review, wrote, Molesini’s novel “is wonderfully alive—often terribly so—as a wartime adventure & story of youth arriving at manhood.”

• Tuesday, May 17th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Poet Brad Crenshaw & author Leslie Lawrence will read from recently published work.   Crenshaw, who lives in the Valley, will read from his recent epic poem, Genealogies — a book-length poem about a sixteenth-century privateer rendered immortal by his Native American wife with forways into time travel, birdmen, genetic manipulation, Grateful Dead concerts, quantum mechanics & Manichaeism. Crenshaw’s poems & critical articles have appeared in various magazines, including Chicago Review, Parnassus, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah.   He is author of a collection of Shakespearian prose sonnets, My Gargantuan Desire.   Lawrence has been published in many journals & periodicals, including Prairie Schooner, Witness, Solstice, The Forward, & The Boston Globe Magazine.   Her new book, The Death of Fred Astaire: And Other Essays from a Life Outside the Lines, as Sven Birkerts says, “assembles a realistic & venturesome portrait of the author—as writer, teacher, partner, mother, grieving partner, perennial seeker—while capturing the complicated texture of the post-1960s decades of American life.   Lawrence’s reach is wide, her narrative skills highly honed, & her tone is resonant with a sense of truth being told.”

• Tuesday, May 17th at 7:00pm (Talk)

Jules Chametzky will share his recollections of writers at the Jones Library, Amherst.   Chametzky co-founded The Massachusetts Review & is author of numerous books, including Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates & Other Jewish Writers: A Cultural Memoir.

• Thursday, May 19th at 4:30pm (Book launch party)

Join Amherst College professor Ellen Boucher in celebrating the publication of her latest book in paperback, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, & the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967.   Boucher, a social & cultural historian of Modern Europe, tells the story of Britain’s child migrants: the roughly 90,000 poor or orphaned British children who were sent by charities & government officials to start new lives in the “white dominions” of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, & Southern Rhodesia.

• Tuesday, May 24th at 7:00pm (Talk)

Rud Platt will talk at the Jones Library, Amherst.   Platt is author of Reclaiming American Cities: The Struggle for People, Place, & Nature since 1900, among other books.

• Monday, May 30th at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Chris Cheney, Amy Lawless, Ali Power, & Halie Theoharides will read from their recent collections of poetry.   Cheney, an alum of the M.F.A. Program for Poets & Writers here at UMass, is co-author of I Cry: The Desire to be Rejected as well as a recent collection of poetry, Lay Me Low.   His poems have recently appeared in Horsethief, jubilat, & Stonecutter Journal.   Lawless is the author of two books of poems, including My Dead.   She is also co-author of I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected.   Her poems have recently appeared in jubilat, The Volta, & Washington Square Review.   She been anthologized in Best American Poetry & the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion.   Power is the author of the book-length poem A Poem for Record Keepers & is a co-editor of the volume New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight. & She co-curates the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series.   Theoharides is a poet & visual artist from Western Massachusetts.   She is the managing editor of jubilat & the author of the chapbook Into the Leaf Gloom.

• Tuesday, May 31st at 7:00pm (Reading)

Brian Adams will read from his new YA novel, KABOOM!.     An expertly crafted coming to age & activism novel, KABOOM! tells the story of Cyndie & Ashley, two spunky & spirited teens from coal country West Virginia, who become activists overnight when their beloved mountain is threatened by Big Coal.   Adams, who taught Environmental Science at Greenfield Community College for many years is also author of the wonderfully funny Love in the Time of Climate Change.