Join us for an evening of readings from local honorees of this year's Mass Book Awards, presented by Forbes Library and the Center for the Book:  Gary Metras, Rebecca Olander, Lesléa Newman, Ruth Ozeki, and Martín Espada.

Be there in person or watch the livestream via YouTube. 

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a Massachusetts Book Award. In addition to his several volumes of poetry, he is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

Gary Metras was appointed Easthampton’s inaugural Poet Laureate in 2018. He is a retired educator, having taught high school and college. His poems have appeared in such periodicals as America, The Common, and Poetry. He edited Adastra Press for 40 years, specializing in hand-crafted limited editions. He is a fly fishing enthusiast and has worked on several area river restoration projects with Pioneer Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited, of which he is past president. His newest of eight books of poems is Vanishing Points (2021), a Must Read Poetry Book in the 2022 Mass. Book Awards.

Lesléa Newman has created 80 books for readers of all ages including the dual memoir-in-verse, “I Carry My Mother” and “I Wish My Father,” the novel-in-verse, “October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard,” and the picture  books, “Gittel’s Journey: An Ellis Island Story,” “Sparkle Boy,” and “Heather Has Two Mommies.” Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, two National Jewish Book Awards, two American Library Association Stonewall Honors, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work Award. From 2008 - 2010, she was the poet laureate of Northampton.

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (2018). Her books include Dressing the Wounds (2019) and Uncertain Acrobats (2021). Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and Amherst College and works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.
Her new novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness tells the story of a young boy who, after the death of his father, starts to hear voices and finds solace in the companionship of his very own book.
Her novels, My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2022) have been translated and published in over thirty countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness is the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction.