The Care Center is excited to welcome the following poets & authors in 2025!
(All events are free and open to the community; to RSVP or learn more, please email srauch@carecenterholyoke.org)
Ada Limón
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
1pm, Virtual via Zoom (email srauch@carecenterholyoke.org for link)
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and a TIME magazine woman of the year. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. Her first books for children include In Praise of Mystery and And, Too, The Fox.
Sabrina Orah Mark
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
10am @ The Care Center, 247 Cabot St., Holyoke MA 01040
Sabrina Orah Mark‘s Happily, a collection of essays on fairytales and motherhood, began as a monthly column in The Paris Review, and recently won a National Jewish Book Award. Raised in Brooklyn, Mark is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum, and The Babies (winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize). Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons.
Ayana Mathis
Friday, April 4, 2025
10am @ The Care Center, 247 Cabot St., Holyoke MA 01040
Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller. Her second novel, The Unsettled, was published in 2023 to much acclaim. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, RollingStone, Guernica and Glamour. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an assistant professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College’s MFA Program.
Tiana Clark
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
1pm @ The Care Center, 247 Cabot Street, Holyoke MA 01040
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, and Equilibrium. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Prageeta Sharma
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
1pm @ Holyoke Media, 536 Dwight St., Holyoke MA 01040
Prageeta Sharma is the author of five poetry collections, including Grief Sequence and The Opening Question, winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College, and lives in Claremont, California.
2024 Visitors
Kaveh Akbar
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In 2024, Kaveh’s first novel, Martyr!, will be published.
Nathan McClain
Wednesday February 21, 2024
Nathan McClain was born and raised in the lower desert of Southern California. He is the author of Scale, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Guesthouse, The Common, and The Critical Flame, among others. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Jessica Jacobs
Monday March 25, 2024
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Unalone; Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry and one of Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of the Year; and Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is the founder of Yetzirah, an organization for Jewish poets.
Carrie Fountain
Monday April 1, 2024
Carrie Fountain is the author of three poetry collections: Burn Lake, which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2009; Instant Winner; and most recently, The Life. Of The Life, poet laureate Ada Limon says, “Fountain’s stunning poems illuminate the complexities of motherhood and marriage with a clear, lyrical voice that speaks to us all.” Carrie Fountain is also the author of YA novel, I’m Not Missing, and a children’s book, The Poem Forest, about the life and legacy of poet and ecologist W.S. Merwin. Carrie’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker, among many others.
Martín Espada
Monday, June 17, 2024
1pm @ Wistariahurst Museum
Born in Brooklyn, Martín Espada is the author of more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. Espada published his first poetry collection, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, in 1982. He is now the author of more than twenty books, including Floaters, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, and The Republic of Poetry. His many honors include the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelly Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2018, he received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.
Lesléa Newman
Wednesday, July 24, 2024 @ 1pm
Lesléa Newman began her writing career as a teenager when she published poems in Seventeen magazine. Fast forward to today, and she is now the author of 85 books. Her prolific output includes Always Matt: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard, as well as October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, Hachiko Waits, Sparkle Boy, and Heather Has Two Mommies, which was one of the first pieces of LGBTQ+ children’s literature to garner broad attention back in 1989 when it was initially published. Her work has won numerous awards, among them the National Jewish Book Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award. She has spoken at college campuses all over the United States, and from 2008-2010, she served at the Poet Laureate of Northampton.
Tzivia Gover
Monday, August 5, 2024 @ 1pm
Tzivia Gover is the author of Dreaming on the Page and Learning in Mrs. Towne’s House. She founded the Poetry Program at The Care Center over 20 years ago!
Joan Kwon Glass
Friday, October 18, 2024
10am @ Pa’lante
Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean diasporic author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize) & Night Swim, as well as the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy & If Rust Can Grow on the Moon. Her books & poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, and Rattlecast.
Franny Choi
Friday, October 25, 2024
10am @ Pa’lante
Franny Choi‘s books include The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Soft Science, and Floating, Brilliant, Gone. Franny’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA and the founder of Brew & Forge. Franny is Faculty in Literature at Bennington College.
Ross Gay
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
1pm, Virtual
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights; Inciting Joy; and The Book of (More) Delights.
Tobias Wray
December 4, 2024
10am @ The Care Center
Tobias Wray is the author of No Doubt I Will Return Home a Different Man. His poems, reviews, and other writing appear widely in literary journals, including on Verse Daily, Poem-a-Day, Impossible Archetype, The Arkansas International, Hunger Mountain, and The Georgia Review. His work has also been anthologized in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology and elsewhere. An assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma where he directs UCO’s Creative Writing Programs, his interests range from experimental poetics to queer and speculative literatures to literary translation. He is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
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