Join us for a poetry reading with poets Jessica Purdy, Jeri Theriault, and Robert Carr on Wednesday, November 1st at 7pm!
Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Radar, The Night Heron Barks, One Art, Hole in the Head Review, Museum of Americana, and Gargoyle. Murder in the House, a pamphlet of her poems on the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, was released by Buttonhook Press in 2022; the full chapbook of these poems, The Adorable Knife, was published by Grey Book Press in August 2023. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry) were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. She is the author of the chapbook Learning the Names (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and is poetry editor for the anthology Ten Piscataqua Writers. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaPurdy123 and at her website.
Jeri Theriault’s recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, The Asheville Review, Plume, and many other publications. Her recent collections are Radost, my red, (M)OTHER, and Self-Portrait as Homestead. She is the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. Jeri lives in South Portland, Maine.
Robert Carr was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1959. He is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine where he studied philosophy and was an active member of the Bates Dance Ensemble. Following his undergraduate work, Robert moved to Portland, Maine where he pursued a brief career in the arts as an actor with the Children’s Theater of Maine.
In 1984, Robert moved to Boston, volunteered with the AIDS Action Committee, and became the first HIV testing counselor with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In response to the HIV pandemic, Robert engaged in a 33-year career in public health and recently retired from the position of Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences in Massachusetts.
Robert is a Pushcart and Best of The Net nominated poet whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Cortland Review, Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner, Maine Review, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Sonora Review, Tar River Poetry, and other publications. He is a 2022 Monson Arts resident; co-editor for the 2019 Ghana Literary Group anthology, Bodies and Scars; and a member of Writing the Land, an initiative pairing poets and land trusts in order to promote preservation.