PLEASE REGISTER BELOW FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM

Join us at our capstone event for the 2023-24 season with nationally acclaimed poets Charles Coe, John Hodgen, and Henry Walters. The poets will read and engage in a Q & A, followed by book signings and light refreshments.

Poet, prose writer, musician (vocals and didgeridoo) and filmmaker Charles Coe reads from his newest collection, Purgatory Road (Leapfrog Press 2023), “a contemporary urban Spoon River Anthology” writes poet and critic Richard Hoffman. Coe is also the author of three other poetry collections from Leapfrog Press: Picnic on the Moon, All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents and Memento Mori. His work has appeared in numerous publications and literary journals and his poems have been set to music by composers Julia Carey, Beth Denisch and Robert Moran. Charles has received a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship in poetry, was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light in 2014” and by the City of Boston as a 2017 Artist-in-Residence. He teaches poetry in the MFA programs at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island and Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Find Charles at his website: https://www.charlescoe.org/

John Hodgen, the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, and Advisory Editor for New Letters at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, reads from his sixth collection, What We May Be (Lynx House Press 2024) described as “a cry of love and pain (and he makes them almost indistinguishable) on behalf of the human race, its history, its future, its lovely possibilities that seem always out of reach. The poems of this award-winning poet declare again and again that the reaching itself defines the best in us, and he is cheering us on.” John is also the author of In My Father’s House, winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas; Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House Press 2001, winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press 2005), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and Finalist for the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize; and The Lord of Everywhere (Lynx House Press 2019).

Henry Walters reads from his second poetry collection, The Nature Thief (The Waywiser Press 2022), finalist for the Sixteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. In its praise writes poet Sherod Santos, “THE NATURE THIEF gives proof to Faulkner’s famous adage: ‘The past is not dead, it is not even past. Poetry is a history of language, and Walters’ full-throated poems are pitched high and low, lyrical at one moment, street-wise the next, drawing on sources as various as a deconstructed Hamlet, a Greek grammar, the sound of a pool ball dropping into a leather pocket. Nothing is unlikely to find its way in, and nothing is unlikely to be burnished by the lyrical sway of this erudite and immensely talented poet.”

Walters’ first collection, Field Guide A Tempo (Granite State Poetry Series, 2014) was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His poems, essays, and translations from Italian have appeared in periodicals such as Raritan, The Yale Review, Literary Imagination, The Threepenny Review, and Orion. The founder of Monadnock Falconry, Henry lives in Hancock, New Hampshire, with his young family, a hive of bees, and two hawks. Visit his Master Falconer website: https://www.monadnockfalconry.com

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
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