Literary Arts Events

Upcoming Literary Arts Events

Don McLagen

LIz Kelner Pozen

Poetry Reading with Don McLagen and Liz Kelner Pozen
Date: Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Time: 5:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: Free

Join poets Don McLagan and Liz Kelner Pozen for an evening of poetry featuring readings from their published works. Explore themes of memory, place, and the human experience, followed by a conversation with the authors.

Don McLagan is an entrepreneur and poet. He is the author of four books of poetry, Poems of 1968 Then as Now: Divided, Hurt and Raging (2025), Chappaquiddick Poems (2023), Fragments in a Glass Bowl (2019), and Tug at the Knot (2016). For forty years a tech
innovator, McLagan is now retired, advises young entrepreneurs and writes poetry. He lives and writes in Sarasota Florida and Chappaquiddick, a sometimes separate island off Martha’s
Vineyard.

Liz Kelner Pozen is a painter, poet and retired psychotherapist who lives in Boston and on Martha’s Vineyard. She is the author of three books of poetry A Scarred Samovar (2025), Salami (2020), and The Heart of the Family (2017), and three children’s books, Sam and the number 8 (2025), Grandma Can’t Hear (2024), and The What Ifs (2022).

Book Reading with Elena Azzoni
Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: Free

Join us for a reading with Elena Azzoni, an Italian-American writer whose work explores identity, desire, and the long road back to the body. Azzoni will read from her debut novel, Tizzy.

She is the author of A Year Straight (Seal Press, 2011), and her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Elle, make/shift magazine, The Stephanie Miller Show, and feminist anthology, We Don't Need Another Wave (Seal Press, 2006). Elena holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry from New College of California, where she studied under renowned activist poet, Judy Grahn. She also holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Social Thought & Political Economy from UMass, Amherst, and is currently pursuing an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Elena lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.

Learn more

Poetry Reading with Billy Collins
Date: Saturday, September 26, 2026
Time: 6:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: $30
Presented in partnership with PathwaysARTS.
Registration opens Wednesday, July 1st.

Billy will also be teaching a one day poetry workshop on Friday, September 25th.

Please join us on Saturday, September 26th to hear U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins read from his work in the Francine Kelly Gallery. Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. Presented in partnership with PathwaysARTS.

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.

Previous 2026

Washashore Writers Volume Two Reading
Date: Saturday, June 20, 2026
Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: Free

On Saturday, June 20th, Featherstone Center for the Arts will host a reading from the newly published second volume of “Washashores Review,” by the Washashores Writers Collective.

The Vineyard-based Washashores Writers Collective is a diverse and vibrant sisterhood dedicated to the craft of writing. “Washashores Review” features poetry, essays, and fiction written by 24 local women-identifying authors.

Proceeds from the sale of “Washashores Review” support Featherstone’s literary arts program, whose mission is “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.”

Fanny Howe Tribute Reading curated by Jennifer Tseng
Date: Thursday, June 18, 2026
Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: Free

“Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty. Like stained glass, her writing awaits illumination, but it is important not to flood them with a klieg light. . . . It is marvelous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life.” — The New Yorker

Fanny Howe was the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Howe grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford University. “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle,” Howe explained in a 2004 interview with the Kenyon Review. Indeed, more than a subject or theme, the process of recording experience is central to Howe’s poetry. Her work explores grammatical possibilities, and its rhythms are generated from associative images and sounds.

Howe’s collections of poetry include Manimal Woe (2021), Love and I (2019), The Needle’s Eye (2016), Second Childhood (2014), Come and See (2011), On the Ground (2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), and The End (1992). Critic Jordan Davis lauds the manner in which revelatory thought is presented in Gone: “Howe enacts what the South American poet Jorge Guinheime called hasosismo, or the art of the fallen limb, in which startling insights emerge and are subsequently concealed.” Critic Kimberley Lamm, discussing the poem “Doubt,” writes, “Fanny Howe’s work is unique in contemporary poetry for its exploration of religious faith, ethics, politics, and suffering.” Second Childhood (2014) was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award.

Howe was the author of many novels, including Nod, The Deep North, Famous Questions, Saving History, and Indivisible. She wrote short stories, books for young adults, and the collection of literary essays The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003) and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation (2009).

Howe received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacDowell Colony. Her Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 2001 and 2005, Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2008 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.

Howe taught for almost 20 years in Boston, at MIT, Tufts University, and elsewhere, before taking a job at the University of California at San Diego, where she was professor emerita. In 2012 she was the inaugural visiting writer in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her papers are housed at Stanford University. Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of 84.

Poetry Reading with Naomi Shihab Nye
Date: Wednesday, June 3, 2026
Time: 6:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Fee: $30

Please join us for an evening with award-winning Palestinian -American poet, essayist and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is the author and or editor of more than 30 volumes: books of poetry, collections of essays, anthologies, and fiction. A fundraiser for Featherstone, Nye will read from her published work. Q&A and book signing to follow (The Tiny Journalist and Everything Comes Next will be available for purchase from Edgartown Books at the event). Presented in partnership with PathwaysARTS.

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Please consider a donation to help bring inclusive literary arts offerings to our community:

donate now