Christy Crutchfield is the author of the novel How to Catch a Coyote.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Massachusetts Review, Salt Hill Journal, jubilat, and other journals. She recently received a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and serves on the editorial staff of Juked. She writes and teaches in Western Massachusetts.

Madeline ffitch writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio. She was a founding member of the punk theater company, The Missoula Oblongata, and works with the collective Appalachia Resist! She is the author of the story collection, Valparaiso, Round the Horn. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, Granta, and VICE. Her novel, Stay and Fight will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the Spring.

Noy Holland is the recipient of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story “Tally” was included in Best American Short Stories, and read by Suzzy Roche at Symphony Space in New York City. Her books include I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories; the novel Bird; and three collections of short fiction and novellas-- Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published fiction and essays in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She has taught since 1997 in the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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.