Join us for an outstanding afternoon featuring multi-honored poets Cammy Thomas of Bolton and Gary Whited of Boston. Their readings will follow with a Q & A about their inspirations and craft, book signings, and light refreshments.

PLEASE REGISTER BELOW FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM

Cammy Thomas reads from her recent chapbook, Odysseus’ Daughter, written in response to fourteen years of teaching Homer’s great epic at Concord Academy. These poems imagine what some characters may have said and thought, and invent some new characters as well.

“Anyone who has taught the Odyssey repeatedly – as Thomas has – knows how beautifully it opens up conversations about love, family, heroism, mortality, gender politics, and community. Thomas’s poems touch on many of these themes but what struck me most was their repeated return to the uncanny: the sense that on some level we are unfamiliar to ourselves, shot through with contradictory yearnings as we negotiate what she calls in one poem the “shifting voids of the waves,” writes poet and essayist Ruth Hoberman for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene.

 Thomas’s first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her third book, Tremors, received Poetry Honors from the 2022 Mass Book Awards. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete Inscriptions. Her poem, “French Toast,” was featured on Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2021. Two of her poems are the text for Far Past War, a choral work by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, which premiered with the Cathedral Choral Society, at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. She now teaches literature to adults, and lives in Bolton, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit www.cammythomas.com. (Photo Credit: Claire Siesfeld)

Poet, philosopher, and psychotherapist Gary Whited reads from his second collection, Being, There, recalling his life growing up on a ranch in eastern Montana, where his maternal and paternal grandparents had homesteaded in the early 1900’s.

As poet Jennifer Barber writes, “Whited’s new collection is a meditation on Being. Traveling through time to re-encounter his childhood on his father’s ranch in Montana, he probes his own nature with psychological acuity, philosophical insight, and startling clarity of image. “Now I unroll each memory of these earthly things,” Whited writes, and we are wholly with him as he hoists a pail full of milk, reaches inside a cow to help her calf get born, or distributes “hay to all the four-leggeds” and “water, always water, to us all.” Set side by side with his luminous translations of fragments from Parmenides, Whited’s deeply felt and powerfully realized poems open new paths into how we understand woundedness, healing, and the nature of existence.”

Leaving the ranch to attend college, Whited eventually found his way into the study of philosophy with a special interest in the ancient Greek thinkers. He was intrigued by a kinship between the ancient ways and the life he’d known on the prairie. For several years he taught philosophy at various universities (University of Montana, University of Texas, and eventually Emerson College) and later, realizing that the activity of listening was a thread that ran through his entire life, he became a psychotherapist.

His first book, Having Listened, was selected by the Independent Book Publishers Association for a Benjamin Franklin Book Award. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Salamander, Plainsongs, The Aurorean, Atlanta Review, and Comstock Review. To learn more, please visit https://www.garylwhited.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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