Writers Melissa Karen Sances and Bruce Watson will read and talk about their work as part of the Readers & Writers Live series.

This event will also be livestreamed on the Forbes Library YouTube channel. Click here to view.

About the writers: 

Longtime Daily Hampshire Gazette columnist Bruce Watson is the author of four well-reviewed books on American history, each enlivening forgotten or neglected periods in the nation’s past. These include Freedom Summer, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Bread and Roses. Since 2017, Watson has been the writer, editor, and webmaster of The Attic: For a Kinder, Cooler America. The Attic, updated weekly, features short articles about American dreamers, wonders, wits, builders, teachers, and more. With 3,000 weekly subscribers and some 350 articles online, The Attic is getting a little cluttered but still offers surprises for those who choose to rummage at www.theattic.space. 

Watson’s most recent book is Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age (Bloomsbury 2016). The book traces humanity's fascination with light through the lenses of mythology, scripture, philosophy, art history, photography, and physics. The Washington Post called the book "a delightful journey." The American Library Association added, "A dazzling book.” Light was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. 

Along with his Gazette column that ran weekly from 1994-2015, Watson has written three dozen feature articles for Smithsonian on topics ranging from the history of Coney Island to Ferraris to fallout shelters. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, American Heritage, Nautilus, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Yankee, Reader’s Digest, and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003.

Melissa Karen Sances has loved writing since she received her first diary at the age of seven. A shy student with so much she couldn’t say, she found her voice, lyrical and powerful, on those promising pastel pages. With a keen eye and an ear for poetry, she first saw her name in print as an undergraduate at UMass-Dartmouth, where she earned a bachelor’s in creative writing and fell in love with journalism. Over the next 20 years, Sances was published in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe and the Globe magazine. She was the senior editor of Vero Beach magazine, a monthly glossy where she published more than 50 longform features, specializing in profiles on thoughtful icons like actor Joey Pantoliano and humorist Dave Barry.

In 2019, Sances decided to write her own story while in graduate school at Emerson College. Her memoir-in-progress, Grey Matter, reflects on the intersection of memory and identity when her long-term memory is lost. (Her diaries, now numbering in the hundreds, literally save her life.) At Emerson, her faculty advisor was Jerald Walker, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, and she earned her MFA in Creative Writing in 2022.

Upon graduation, Sances moved to Western Mass, where she has been a regular writer for the Valley Advocate, the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Northampton Living magazine. She completed the 10-Month Manuscript Program at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop in 2023, and she is thrilled to join the greater community in celebrating our local, magical authors.