Welcome to the Newburyport Literary Festival!

We are a vibrant community of readers and writers who come together each year to bask in the love of reading. A celebration of literature, from fiction to poetry to non-fiction and biography, the festival features author readings, panel discussions, and book signings held in venues across historic Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Schedule of Events:

8:30 am: Breakfast With the Poets: Powow River Poets Read Their Work

Join our local and invited featured poets and enjoy fresh, local breakfast pastries, donuts, and muffins with coffee or tea. We launch our day of moving and provocative poetry with three of Newburyport's nationally recognized Powow River Poets reading from their recently released books of poetry.

Presenters: Al Basile, Mary Hills Kuck, and Anton Yakovlev
Moderator: Owen X. Grey

9:00 am: Coming of Age in New England: A Debut Fiction Panel

You only get to publish your debut adult novel once, and authors Maggie Thrash and Essie Chambers have made the most of it with two smashing novels featuring entrancing characters in small New England towns navigating complicated family dynamics. Liberty Hardy will interview Essie Chambers about Swift River, a story of a complicated bond between mothers and daughters, the disappearance of a father, and the long-hidden history of a declining New England mill town, and Maggie Thrash about Rainbow Black, part murder mystery, part gay international fugitive love story set against the '90s Satanic Panic and spanning 20 years in the life of a young woman pulled into its undertow. Hardy will also talk with both authors about their experience bringing these books into the world.

Presenters: Maggie Thrash and Essie Chambers
Moderator: Liberty Hardy

9:00 am: Donuts in Discussion: Strong Women On and Off the Page

At a previous festival, a group of invited authors connected over coffee and doughnuts at Newburyport's The Angry Donut on Inn Street. They started a group chat and have remained connected ever since. Three of the five "Donuts" are reuniting this year to discuss their new work, and strong and/or angry women on and off the page. As writers, the group's members have bonded over topics they feel strongly about. Similarly, their characters face challenges and need strength to get through them. The Donuts—KJ Dell'Antonia (Playing the Witch Card), amy Poeppel (upcoming Far and Away), and Namrata Patel (upcoming The Curious Secrets of Yesterday)—will also discuss the origin of their group, how they empower their characters, and the idea of supporting other authors.

Presenters: KJ Dell'Antonia, amy Poeppel, and Namrata Patel

9:00 am: An Unusual History of the First World War With James Charles Roy

Historian James Charles Roy brings new perspectives and unexpected details of World War I to the page in All the World at War: People and Places, 1914-1918. This meticulously researched history is the result of much travel and reflection, according to novelist and critic Allan Massie (The Scotsman), and is "a rich and thought-provoking book."

Presenter: James "Jim" Charles Roy

9:00 am: The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne: A Conversation With Ron Currie

"A hyperviolent family saga with surprising amounts of humor and empathy," is how Kirkus Reviews describes Ron Currie's The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. This literary thriller explores love, retribution, and the ancestral roots as it follows Babs, a Franco-american matriarch who also happens to control the flow of drugs into Waterville, Maine. Currie will be in conversation with longtime friend of the festival C.B. Bernard (Ordinary Bear, Small Animals Caught in Traps).

Presenter: Ron Currie
Moderator: C.B. Bernard

9:00 am: Women's Work: A History of Female Entrepreneurship

About 40 percent of small businesses in the U.S. are owned by women, a trend that started after World War II, as the jobs they had stepped into during the war evaporated. Professor and historian Debra Michals explores the last eight decades of female-helmed companies in She's the Boss: The Rise of Women's Entrepreneurship Since World War II, as well as the social trends, economic forces, and new technologies that intersect with the movement. In conversation with novelist Nancy Crochiere (Graceland).

Presenters: Debra Michals
Moderator: Nancy Crochiere

9:45 am: The Poetry of Ned Balbo, Jane Satterfield, and Chelsea Woodard

Coming to hear and read the poems of Ned Balbo is to be deeply in touch with the goodness of being. This metaphysical poetic underlies his powerful family poems, superb in their craft and keen in their use and precision of language. And when Ned Balbo is done "slinging sweet iambics," the poet he is married to—the formidable Jane Satterfield—will read her poems, and no doubt "set the house / abuzz as any hive" with The Badass Brontës, as in Charlotte and Emily of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Joining this inimitable duo will be Chelsea Woodard, reading from her award-winning collection At the Lepidopterist's House, where the poet finds in the delicacy of a butterfly a mirror of our own bodily frailty and transience. Woodard promises, in this reading, to "catch her net on beauty."

Presenters: Ned Balbo, Jane Satterfield, and Chelsea Woodard
Moderators: Owen X. Grey, Priscilla Turner Spada, and Bob Moore

10:00 am: 200 Years at the Old Gaol

The Old Gaol, with its iron spikes and imposing granite façade, has sparked the imagination of the good people of Newburyport for two centuries. A working jail until 1917, the Gaol, Jailkeeper's House, and Stables are masterpieces rendered in Rockport granite by architect Stuart Park. Join architect Charles Griffin, who has worked and lived in the Gaol complex since 1987, and Bethany Groff Dorau, executive director of the Museum of Old Newbury, for a fun exploration of this remarkable building and the unforgettable cast of characters who inhabited her—many under lock and key.

Presenters: Charles Griffin, Bethany Groff Dorau

10:30 am: The Science of Beauty With Alan Lightman

MIT professor and writer Alan Lightman returns to Newburyport with a new illustrated book of essays, The Miraculous From the Material. The collection examines the science behind some of the most awe-inspiring scenes in nature, from a spider's web to a shooting star, to "make sense of all the beauty that surrounds us," according to Time magazine. The Einstein's Dreams author will be in conversation with longtime friend of the festival Steve Yarbrough (Stay Gone Days, The Unmade World).

Presenter: Alan Lightman
Moderator: Steve Yarbrough

10:30 am: On Friendship and Freedom: Marjan Kamali in Conversation With Jenna Blum

Marjan Kamali (The Stationary Shop) returns to the festival to discuss her epic new novel, The Lion Women of Tehran, with New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum. Set against three transformative decades in the Iranian capital, the novel is a powerful and timely exploration of the ways women's friendships and freedoms can shift over time. In this moment, when women's roles are once again being redefined, this is a book and discussion we need more than ever.

Presenter: Marjan Kamali
Moderator: Jenna Blum

10:30 am: Fading Ink: Looking Back at 50 Years of Journalism

Dyke Hendrickson spent decades as a journalist, working at newspapers in Mexico, Portland, Maine, New Orleans, and Boston. He's covered beats including tennis, sports, music, and television, and it's led him to interview Martina Navratilova at the U.S. Open, ride the elevator with Robert Duvall (Lonesome Dove), and attend a party at the home of Larry Hagman (Dallas). His new memoir, Boston's Fading Ink, looks back on those years and the changing face of journalism. He will be in conversation with his daughter, journalist Leslie Hendrickson.

Presenter: Dyke Hendrickson
Moderator: Leslie Hendrickson

10:30 am: Sweetmint and the Lumberjacks, or Speculative Fiction and the Retelling of a Myth: A Conversation With Mateo Askaripour and Mark Cecil

Bestselling author Mateo Askaripour's This Great Hemisphere—a family quest and thriller set in 2529, when half of people, including Sweetmint, are invisible to the privileged visible people—was called "wildly imaginative" by The Washington Post. Meanwhile, Mark Cecil's debut, Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny "pairs the historical traumas of inequality and labor manipulation, Black and white, in a new american folktale" in his retelling of the now mythic lumberjacks, according to the Minnesota Reformer. The authors will be in conversation about their work, literary mashups, and finding new ways to tell old stories.

Presenters: Mateo Askaripour and Mark Cecil

10:30 am: Return to the Farm: A Merrimack Valley Trilogy

In the Merrimack Valley is a collection of Jane Brox's three books about returning to her family's farm, including Here and Nowhere Else; Five Thousand Days Like This One; and Clearing Land. The trilogy blends personal narrative with the history of farms and farming, resulting in a treatise on family and humans' relationship with the land. Her work has been called "a loving, precisely written evocation of a New England place and its people… reminiscent of Thoreau in its exactness and breadth of implications." In conversation with editor Joshua Bodwell.

Presenter: Jane Brox
Moderator: Joshua Bodwell

11:00 am: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses—particularly those pioneered by Black women—to white oppression. The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the american and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.

Presenter: Kellie Carter Jackson

11:15 am: The Poetry of A.M. Juster and Brad Leithauser

Nothing in literature quite compares to the sparkle of men of the world making their way home. A.M. Juster's experiences working in senior positions in the White House are doubtless in play in Girlatee, the harrowing adventure of a young manatee, illustrated in detailed pencil drawings and told in delightful rhymes that call to mind the beloved verses of Robert Louis Stevenson. Like Juster's poetry and translations, Brad Leithauser's books of fiction, criticism, and poetry—18 and counting—bear the imprints of the nation's leading publishers. A MacArthur Fellow and knight of Iceland's Order of the Falcon, Leithauser—delightfully—begins his new book with "Lullabies for a Newborn," before turning to moving reflections of the currents of a life lived often abroad, in Asia and Europe.

Presenters: A. M. Juster and Brad Leithauser
Moderators: Alfred Nicol and Owen X. Grey

1:00 pm: 300 Years of Romance, Revolutionaries, and Reformers at the First Religious Society Unitarian Universalist Newburyport

The First Religious Society began in a Market Square meeting house built in 1725 and grew into the current iconic building on Pleasant Street in 1801. By 1825, the church was affiliated with the Unitarian denomination and is a Unitarian Universalist congregation today. Join historian Ghlee Woodworth for a fun talk about the characters and events that shaped the history of this congregation.

Presenter: Ghlee E. Woodworth

1:00 pm: The Life and Reads of an Audiobook Narrator
Join audiobook narrators, led by Chris Ciulla of Leonardo Audio and Nor'easter Publishing, for a discussion of the process of being a narrator—from the prologue to the final page—and how they can help authors prepare for an audiobook production. There will be time for questions, as well as several readings from these professional audiobook narrators.

Moderator: Chris Ciulla

1:00 pm: Hot Book Summer: A Conversation With Alison Espach and J. Courtney Sullivan

What makes a hot summer book a hot summer book? Local author Holly Robinson will talk to festival veteran J. Courtney Sullivan (The Cliffs) and highly anticipated festival newcomer Alison Espach (The Wedding People) about their latest bestselling novels. Join us for what is sure to be a lively discussion on tackling heavy subjects while holding a well-deserved spot in those summer book displays, what it's like to be anointed by a celebrity book club, and the next step on the writing path for each.

Presenters: Alison Espach and J. Courtney Sullivan
Moderator: Holly Robinson

1:00 pm: Writing From the Real: Tova Mirvis and Elizabeth Graver in Conversation

How much do novelists draw from real life? And how much gets fictionalized in the telling? Elizabeth Graver based her most recent novel, Kantika, on her own family history. We Would Never, by Tova Mirvis, takes a real-life murder case as its starting point. Join the authors as they discuss their processes—and how they helped each other along the way.

Presenters: Tova Mirvis and Elizabeth Graver

1:00 pm: Mass Center for the Book Presents Prisons for Profit: Racism and the History of Incarceration in the North

"A vital contribution to american history and the history of the prison, even as it poses unsettling questions about how and to what end we confront the past," Robin Bernstein's Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook america's Original Prison for Profit tells the story of an 18th-century Black man in a village in New York state whose crime led to the North establishing the prison-for-profit system decades before the 13th amendment outlawed enslavement "except as a punishment for crime"—and the resistance of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other Black leaders. In conversation with Toussaint Losier, associate professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-american Studies at University of Massachusetts-amherst and co-author of Rethinking the american Prison Movement.

Sponsored by Mass Center for the Book.

Presenter: Robin Bernstein
Moderator: Toussaint Losier

1:00 pm: The Modern Witch: Intentions and Internal Magic

Calling all witches! Erica Feldmann, owner of the popular HausWitch store in Salem, Mass., and author of Intention Obsession: Rituals and Witchcraft for Every Season, and amber C. Snider, journalist and author of Wonderment: An Eclectic Guide to Awakening Your Divine Gifts and Inherent Potential, meet in Newburyport to talk ritual, intentions, witchcraft, and, of course, magic. In conversation with Alli Tervo, a multidisciplinary poet, artivist, and body liberationist.

Presenters: amber C. Snider and Erica Feldmann
Moderator: Alli Tervo

1:15 pm: The Poetry of Patrick Sylvain and Dzvinia Orlowsky

In this hour, Newburyport becomes a nexus for poets with deep connections to the world beyond our borders. Haitian american poet and scholar Patrick Sylvain, steeped in diaspora culture, politics, and language, explores memories and images of his island home, and prize-winning translator Dzvinia Orlowsky powerfully evokes the voices of major Ukrainian writers who have been witness to the turmoil in Ukraine, both the devastations of the recent war and the upheavals of a century ago.

Presenters: Patrick Sylvain and Dzvinia Orlowsky
Moderators: Al Basile and Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

2:00 pm: If This (Revolutionary) House Could Talk

Come for an entertaining presentation on how the 2024 "If This House Could Talk" book is created. Delve into the Revolutionary history of several featured homes. Learn how you can participate this year and how you can create a sign that tells the story of your house—ALL houses have a story! It could be a Revolutionary tale, or the story of your living in the house, or anything in between. Come for a Revolutionary walk with us!

Presenters: Barb Bailey, Chris Edmonds, Jack Santos, Bob Watts

2:30 pm: The Poetry of Alfred Nicol and Rachel Hadas

among poets, this hour will be recalled as a historic event. Alfred Nicol, poet of classical austerity, penetrating intellect, and subtle wit, will step to the dais to introduce his small but highly potent masterpiece, After the Carnival. You won't want to miss this, or the succeeding act, as Nicol is joined from New York City by the widely acclaimed poet and translator of classics Rachel Hadas, whose new book, Ghost Guest, meditates on people and places with the sagacity only time can bring and with her own inimitable music, beloved by poets and lovers of poetry in our community.

Presenters: Alfred Nicol and Rachel Hadas
Moderators: Priscilla Turner Spada and Paulette Demers Turco

2:30 pm: All Hail The Master, Welcome The Warrier: Christopher Clarey on Federer and Nadal

Local author Christopher Clarey covered professional tennis for The New York Times from 1991 to 2023. Over the years, he has interviewed both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal-and the players who battled them on the court—countless times and compiled two biographies: The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer (2021) and The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay (coming May 2025). Clarey will talk tennis with Drew Hendrickson, the founder of All Court Enrichment, which provides high-quality summer programs focused on tennis and writing for students in Somerville, Mass.

Presenter: Christopher Clarey
Moderator: Drew Hendrickson

2:30 pm: The Making of a Mystery: A Crime Writers' Panel

Crime fiction contains multitudes, from the dark corners of the human mind to dead bodies in a farmer's field—or on the kitchen floor. Authors Edith Maxwell (Scone Cold Dead), Kate Niles (The Last Hanging of Ángel Martinez), and Tracy Sierra (Nightwatching) will discuss the art of writing a mystery, perfect plotting, and how crime fiction can be a window into more mundane but no less important topics than murder, including art, family, and the secrets of the past. In conversation with mystery and suspense author Connie Hambley.

Presenters: Edith Maxwell, Kate Niles, Tracy Sierra
Moderator: Connie Hambley

2:30 pm: Not Another Book Ban

Fiction can often get to the heart of an issue in ways that other genres can not. Take book banning. Authors Dana Alison Levy (Not Another Banned Book) and Kirsten Miller (Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books) look at the issues around free speech and who can read what, when in this conversation with the owner of Jabberwocky Bookshop, Sue Little.

Presenters: Dana Alison Levy and Kirsten Miller
Moderator: Sue Little

2:30 pm: Go Short: Essays, Stories, and Flash Nonfiction

A collection of personal essays that makes up a memoir, short stories exploring liminal space, and micro essays on feminism: Short-form authors get a lot done in fewer words. But that doesn't mean they don't agonize over those few well-chosen words. "Gifted storyteller" and debut essayist Theresa Okokon (Who I Always Was) and "vivid and taut" short story writer Sara Reish Desmond (What We Might Become) join Gina Barreca, editor of the Fast Funny Women series of flash nonfiction, in a discussion of their recent collections.

Presenters: Theresa Okokon and Sara Reish Desmond
Moderator: Gina Barreca

2:30 pm: No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck: A Conversation With Joan Wickersham and Peter Orner

Joan Wickersham's No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck was described as "miraculous, unique and profound" by Andre Gregory, co-author of My Dinner with Andre. The nonfiction and poetry hybrid examines the doomed 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa, the wreckage of which now sits in a museum at the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. The result is a meditation on life, fate, facing mortality, and, ultimately, death. Wickersham will be in conversation with Dartmouth professor Peter Orner (Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin).

Presenter: Joan Wickersham
Moderator: Peter Orner

3:00 pm: Overlooked Stories, Forgotten No More: A Downtown Walking Tour by the Newburyport Black History Initiative

The mission of the award-winning Newburyport Black History Initiative is to affirm Black heritage and belonging in the city of Newburyport by illuminating histories that have long been overlooked and ensuring that these stories are publicly accessible to a broad audience. This walking tour of the interpretive signs installed in the downtown core will be led by two of the three co-founders of the Initiative, Geordie Vining and Cyd Raschke. We will hear some of the stories of Black americans, including domestic servants, mariners, barbers, soldiers, lawyers, and activists, who lived and worked in Newburyport from the pre-Revolutionary War era to the early 20th century. We will meet at Brown Square, across from City Hall.

Presenters: Geordie Vining and Cynthia "Cyd" Raschke

3:00 pm: TautukKonik/Looking Back

Join photographer Candace Cochrane for an illuminating talk about the making of TautukKonik/Looking Back, a collaborative portrait of Inuit in stories and photographs from northern Labrador. Learn about the collaborative process between Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, repatriating photographs to their source communities, and the shape-shifting meaning of photography and its use in this book.

Presenter: Candace Cochrane

3:45 pm: Bardic Gifts and Epic Tales

Beginning as a teacher in the New York City schools, Rhina P. Espaillat has for many decades shared her bardic gifts and inspired others. In good turn, Newburyport High's award-winning Poetry Soup students will regale Rhina before she steps forward to charm and amuse us with wit and wisdom from her rich and ample trove of published work. Life can't be more rich or full than this, can it? But wait! Here comes National Book Award-winner Martin Espada, whose Jailbreak of Sparrows begins as a portrait of the artist and unfurls to a saga, an epic tale of making good against all the odds, as funny and wild as an episode of Saturday Night Live, as tender as Leaves of Grass.

Presenters: NHS Poetry Soup, Rhina P. Espaillat, Martin Espada
Moderators: Deborah Szabo and Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

7:00 pm: Celebrating the Importance of Being a Reader

When the Newburyport Literary Festival was founded 20 years ago, the main objective was to celebrate and encourage reading.

It still is today.
Join us for an evening of readings and conversation to celebrate two decades of bringing authors and book talks to Newburyport. Festival founder Vicki Hendrickson and longtime owner of Jabberwocky Bookshop Sue Little will be honored for their years of community service, and we will hear readings from local authors and by the late short-story master and area resident Andre Dubus.

Presenters: Peter Berkrot
Honorees: Vicki Hendrickson and Sue Little
MC: Leslie Hendrickson