history

workshops

events

We have a very simple mission: to provide established and emerging writers with time and space to create, and the resources and community to support, encourage and inspire writers at all stages of their writing career.

Open Writing Hours 
Day: Sundays
Dates: beginning January 26, 2025
Time: 1:00-3:00PM
Location: Art Barn Library
Fee: FREE

Looking for a quiet place to write? Come to Featherstone on Sunday afternoons to work quietly among other writers and poets in the Art Barn's library. ​

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My Black Country book reading and music with Alice Randall
Date: Thursday, August 8, 2024
Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: free

​Join us on Thursday, August 8th at 4PM in the Francine Kelly Gallery for an engaging experience with author Alice Randall. She will be reading from her new book, My Black Country. We will be playing music from the companion compilation album My Black Country and refreshments will be served. Visit the event page here.

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The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law with Patricia Williams
Date: Sunday, August 25, 2024
Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery at Featherstone Center for the Arts
Fee: free

​Patricia Williams will read from her new book “The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law” on Sunday, August 25, at 4:00pm.

In this book of essays, law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to address core questions of identity, ethics, and race. With her elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings a keen, analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences — and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate non-normative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers. Visit the event page here.

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Previous 2024

“Not your ordinary poetry reading”
science, poetry, and memoir in three voices
Dust is the Only Secret: Assent to Life
with Fan Ogilvie, Ursula Goodenough and Janet Holladay
Date: Saturday, May 18
Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery 
Fee: Free!
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Join us on Saturday, May 18th at Featherstone for a book reading with poet and artist Fan Ogilvie and guests readers Usula Goodenough (professor of biology) and Janet Holladay (designer and editor of the series). They will be reading from Fan's new series of three poetry books: Dust is the Only Secret: Assent to Life (Book one: To Understand; Book two: To Incorporate; Book three: Then Let It Go).  It includes passages and a scientific arc from Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature, and passages from Fan's early memoir, Knot: a Life.

Fan Ogilvie Bio:

• Fan has taught English and poetry in Washington, DC, New Haven, CT, New York City, NY, and Martha's Vineyard, MA.
• In 1984 she received a Chester H. Jones Foundation commendation award.
• In 2008 Fan published YOU selected poems and KNOT: A LIFE a memoir.
• Selected as the second Poet Laureate of West Tisbury, MA (2009-2012).
• In 2016 EASINESSES FOUND poems and paintings was published. It received special recognition from the Washington Independent Review of Poetry and Grace Cavalieri, creator of the Poet and the Poem series.
• She worked three years at the Dukes County House of Correction, where she and Katie Upson published two volumes of poetry by the inmates...and learned the lyrics to Rap music.
• She is now facilitator of the Cleaveland House Poetry Workshop, the oldest (60 years) continuous poetry group in the USA.
• Fan, also a painter, had a one person show at Featherstone Center for the Arts, two shows at the West Tisbury Public Library, and has had shows in Chilmark Public Library and Galaxy Gallery in Oak Bluffs, all in Massachusetts.
• Fan and Arnie Reisman co-edited a collection of Judith Neeld’s poetry 2019, Judith Neeld Collected Poems. 
• In 2020, Fan published The Berth: American Themes in Poems and Images, a conversation between a contemporary poet and a passenger on the Mayflower 400 years ago answering the question: what has happened to the dreams and experiment in democracy between then and now in America.
• In 2024 Fan published Dust is the Only Secret: Assent to Life, a book of poetry and paintings of the last three years — her 'Whale' of a collection— a lifetime in the making.
• Fan heads the committee to select the 2024-2026 Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate.

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Demystifying the Literary Agent - A Conversation with Rosemary Stimola and Adriana Stimola of Stimola Literary Studio
Date: Thursday, February 15th
Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM ET​
Location: Online via Zoom
Fee: $75
Limited to 20 participants

If you’re an author confused by the literary agent's all-important role, join us for a conversation with Rosemary Stimola and Adriana Stimola of  Stimola Literary Studio. Whether you write fiction, non-fiction, YA, or memoir; and whether you are agented or not, this intimate, one-hour conversation will be an opportunity for you to ask questions and receive answers about the author/agent relationship and the agenting process from two of the industry’s most successful agents.

Rosemary Stimola, a former professor of language and literature and an award-winning children’s bookseller, founded the Stimola Literary Studio in 1997. Representing both fiction and nonfiction from preschool through young adult, and selectively extending into adult fiction, she is honored to count among her clients many award-winning and bestselling authors and illustrators including Suzanne Collins, Matthew Cordell, Thanhha Lai, Karen McManus, Lesa Cline-Ransome, Mary Pearson, Tanya Lee Stone, Matt Tavares and Renee Watson.

Adriana Stimola (she/her) is passionate about ushering stories into being, building creative relationships, and helping to put forth words and images that make lasting impressions and grow our cultural, social and emotional intelligence. She represents a variety of award-winning nonfiction, including psychology and spirituality titles, cookbooks, memoir, art and select humor. Greatly influenced by time spent in her family’s bookstore and restaurant (and by her witchy teenage years), good stories, good food and a connection to the numinous are part of her creative constitution. Before agenting, Adriana worked at Little, Brown, Shambhala Publications and Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, in partnership with Blue Hill Restaurant.

Writing to Heal the Earth
A Conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer and Ursula Goodenough ​

 Thursday, August 31st at 4:00PM
On the Outdoor Stage at Featherstone

THIS EVENT IS COMPLETELY SOLD OUT we are at people and parking capacity. Please NO WALK INS.

Featherstone Center for the Arts welcomes Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, in conversation with Ursula Goodenough, biologist and author of The Sacred Depths of Nature as they discuss what it means to write about the earth during this time of climate crisis. The conversation will be moderated by Marc Favreau, Editorial Director of The New Press and author of Unequal: A Story of America, and will be followed by a brief Q&A and author signing. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. 

Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the  United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS, and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology.  She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Ursula Goodenough is Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University who retired to Martha’s Vineyard in 2017. She taught cell biology and evolution and engaged in research that focused on the sexual cycle of the green soil alga Chlamydomonas, on ciliary motility, and on algal biofuel precursors. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Microbiology Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology. She and many others are developing what is called a religious naturalist orientation religious-naturalist-association.org and a new edition of her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Emerged and Evolved (Oxford University Press) sacreddepthsofnature.com, describes her understandings of this orientation. She has five children and nine grandchildren.

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