In “Please Stand Still the Doors Are Closing”, the poet Anne Boyer writes of and as a radical writer who,  “will fail to produce what we should, or to write or speak articulately enough, to reason clearly enough, to be always right, to be thoughtful or expansive enough, to be responsible at our work’s distribution…[but] we brave our errors in thought for the possibility that to see them demonstrated will allow others to get toward a rightness we missed.” This sense of getting toward something at work is the theme for this evening’s reading, featuring three writers whose work—restless, sagacious, funny, skeptical, hopeful—captures this essence uniquely.

Arda Collins is the author of It Is Daylight, which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is Special Issues Editor for jubilat and teaches at Smith College.

Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the novel Paulina & Fran, the story collection Pee On Water, and the poetry books MOODS and HAIRDO. She was recently named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. She lives and writes in Northampton, MA.

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts, where she is an MA-PhD student at Umass Amherst. She co-curates the But Also house reading series, and co-edits HOLD: a journal. Zoe is the author of Terror Matrix, and is working on a new poetry manuscript and a critical book of trans poetics.

Our Work and Why We Do It is the Forbes Library’s Writer in Residence reading series. This series is interested in exploring the ways in which the written word may create and sustain social worlds through inquiry, practice, experimentation, story and lyric. The dynamic of the public library, open and variegated in its uses, is the ideal space for these questions, as it can so directly reflect the desires of a community that contributes to it's thriving, operating as an archive of those needs. Regardless of genre, this series believes in the potential for deliberation that writing may produce, a space within the information saturated world we share where we might consider possibilities and deeper questions just beyond what we know.

The series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is motivated by an interest in understanding how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. Against dithering, the series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.

Curated and moderated by Forbes writer in residence Art Middleton, the series meets in the Coolidge Museum.