Poetry Reading with James Cook & Trace Peterson
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.
Poetry Reading: Dick Lourie & Mark Pawlak
Join the Gloucester Writers Center for an evening of poetry with Dick Lourie and Mark Pawlak, two longtime poets, editors, and influential voices in independent literary publishing.
Both poets are closely connected to Hanging Loose Press, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2026. Lourie is a co-founder and senior editor of the press, while Pawlak serves as managing editor.
Dick Lourie is the author of Jam Session and Other Poems, a collection alive with the rhythms of jazz and blues, American history, politics, friendship, love, and memory. Music runs throughout the collection, including a title poem that imagines a conversation between Blues and Jazz as two old friends reflecting on their intertwined histories.
A poet and saxophone player, Lourie performed for fifteen years with internationally renowned blues singer Big Jack Johnson. His poetry has appeared widely for more than fifty years, and his poem “Forgiving Our Fathers” was featured in the film Smoke Signals.
Mark Pawlak is the author of Special Operation, his eleventh poetry collection, a powerful exploration of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the human lives caught within it. Through compressed, vivid poems, Pawlak bears witness to violence, endurance, resistance, and the struggle to “remain human” amid war.
His previous books include Away Away and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov. His poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry and has been translated into Chinese, German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish.
Pawlak is retired from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he taught mathematics and received the Chancellor’s Achievement Award.
Come hear two accomplished poets whose work asks us to listen closely—to music, history, conflict, memory, and one another.
Book Reading with Mary Bonina and Mia Millefogle
Join us for a book reading with Mary Bonina and Mia Millefogle at the GWC on Thursday September 24th at 7pm!
Poetry Reading with Kevin Gallagher & Patricio Ferrari
Join us for a poetry reading with Kevin Gallagher & Patricio Ferrari at the GWC on August 6th!
Kevin Gallagher is a poet, publisher and political economist living in Greater Boston. His new book is Diving at the Moon with Spuyten Duyvil press. Recent books are And Yet it Moves and The Wild Goose. Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston area annual of poetry and poetics. He works as a professor of global development policy at Boston University.
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor whose work moves across languages, geographies, and poetic traditions. In 2026, he received the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, Book I of his Elsehere multilingual trilogy—an exploration of migration, identity, and vernacular soundscapes.
