Massachusetts Poetry Festival Headline Event

Please join us for the opening headline event of the Festival! This reading will feature poets Andrea Cohen and January Gill O’Neil. The event will open with a special performance by The Boston Typewriter Orchestra and a reading by the winner of Mass Poetry’s First Poem Contest.

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc.

A new book of poems, The Sorrow Apartments, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Other collections include Everything (Four Way, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way, 2019). Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017),  Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999).

Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, Boston University, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Merrimack College, where she was the founding director of the Writers’ House. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (forthcoming, 2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and currently serves as the 2022-2023 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is a collective percussive ensemble for typewriter and voice based in the Boston area. Creative. Eclectic. Nostalgic. The BTO entertains with collaborative rhythmic, comedic, and satiric performances. Beyond the show itself, the BTO seeks to educate and evangelize the archaic machines they use, allowing folks an opportunity to connect with history and industrial technology, sometimes for the first time.