• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

The Care Center

Bringing the power of education, arts and culture to youth and their families in Holyoke, MA

MENUMENU
  • About
    • Our Approach
    • Impact
    • Press About The Care Center
    • What's New
    • How to Support The Care Center
    • Board of Directors
    • Employment
    • Events
    • Publications
  • Programs
    • Choose Your Program
    • High School-Level Programs
      • HiSET and College Preparation
      • Athletics
      • Arts and Humanities
    • Part-Time College
      • Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities
      • Cabot Street College
    • Bard Microcollege Holyoke
    • Teen Resource Project
  • Services
    • Early Education & Care
    • Transportation & Meals
    • Counseling & Medical Care
  • Meet the Students
    • Student Profiles
    • Student Writing
    • Artwork
    • Poetry
    • Nautilus II
  • CONTACT
    • Get in Touch
  • DONATE NOW
Home » Poetry Events

December 20, 2024

Poetry Events

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.

 

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.

 

 To stay in touch via our poetry email newsletter, please visit this page.

Our poetry programming is supported by

· Categorized: What's New

Primary Sidebar

The Care Center gave me hope and a desire for change. They actually cared about me and my child. I quickly earned my GED at 16 years old.

Danielis Gonzales, Bard Microcollege Holyoke student and Care Center graduate

Recent News

Our Annual Fundraising Party was a Big Success!

Poetry Events

Meet Our Students

My Journey from Student to Staff Member

Julisa Deleon speaks about second chances, Plato, and studying while her ceiling caved in.

When Women Move Forward

See All News →

Footer

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2025 · THE CARE CENTER · All Rights Reserved
247 Cabot Street, Holyoke, MA 01040 | Phone: (413) 532-2900 | Fax: (413) 532-1250


The Care Center is a recipient of the 2011 National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award, the nation’s highest honor recognizing community-based arts and humanities youth programs in the United States, presented by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The Care Center is also a recipient of the Mass Cultural Council’s 2019 Commonwealth Award, honoring exceptional achievement in the arts, humanities, and sciences. We are proud to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Care Center is a 501(c)(3) organization. Tax ID 04-2962882

Site design by Turn Signal Media