Join us for an evening of poetry with two writers whose work spans lyric, scholarship, and community.

James Cook is a teacher and writer whose poems and essays have appeared in Jacket2, SpoKe, Wonderland, Polis, No Infinite, Process, Let the Bucket Down, and elsewhere. He has lectured at the Cape Ann Museum, Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library, the American Literature Association, the Jonathan Bayliss Society, and the Gloucester Writers Center. He has also taken part in the NEH-funded institutes LGBTQ+ Histories of the United States and Harlem’s Education Movements. He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Trace Peterson is a poet, editor, and literary scholar. Her newest collection, The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep, won the 2025 Alma Book Award from Saturnalia and was a Finalist for a Foreword INDIES 2025 Book of the Year Award in Women’s Studies. Her first book, Since I Moved In, won the 2007 Gil Ott Award from Chax Press and was reissued in a new and revised edition in 2019. She is co-editor of the landmark anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013), now in its fourth printing, and edits EOAGH, a literary journal and small press honored with a National Jewish Book Award and two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first Lammy ever given in Transgender Poetry. A former N.E.H. Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, she teaches English and Women’s Studies at the University of Connecticut.