Join us for a special reading by the recently appointed Forbes Library Writer in Residence, Susan Stinson and the founder of the WIR program D M Gordon.

Forbes Library is in the fortunate position to have a Writer in Residence. The WIR is a professional writer who furthers the library's fundamental mission by volunteering numerous hours each week, creating and offering library programming. This spring, local novelist Susan Stinson was appointed as Writer in Residence at Forbes Library. She joins long-time Writer in Residence Diana Martin Gordon, who created the program in 2003 and still advises and contributes in many ways.

Susan Stinson is the award-winning author of three novels and a collection of poetry and lyric essays. She recently completed a novel about eighteenth century Northampton preacher Jonathan Edwards. She has received grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming/Money for Women Fund, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Millay Colony, among others. She has given more than a hundred readings, speeches and workshops across the country, and also does writing coaching and editing, as well as offering cemetery tours and talks about local history. She will be reading from a sampling from her published books --Belly Songs (poems and lyric essays), and Fat Girl Dances With Rocks, Martha Moody, Venus of Chalk (all novels).

from Martha Moody a novel by Susan Stinson :

Martha is a magic woman, huge past the point where size can be considered anything less than a blessing of range to the human world. She doesn't have to consider it at all. When she walks through the streets of town, her clothes stream off her, transformed into feathers, wings, colored sheets, strips of cloth, petals that fly off in a burst. She has majesty.

"I am an enormous fan of Susan Stinson's work, and, as a fan, consider it my duty to help more and more people know about its wonders: I can think of no one who writes with more love, passion, and precision about the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the soul, and that nebulous (often neglected) intersection of body and soul. She writes extraordinary love stories, with intelligence and generosity and a wild imagination."--Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant's House

D M Gordon's short stories and poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Nimrod, The Comstock Review, Northwest Review and the Massachusetts Review, and recently Glimmer train awarded one of her stories first prize. She's a 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in fiction, and a finalist for the same fellowship in poetry in 2004. Editor, workshop and critique group facilitator, she is currently working on a novel set in the Gulf Islands, as well as a poetry manuscript to be published by Levellers Press in 2011. She will be reading from Fourth World, her recently published hand pressed chapbook from Adastra Press.

from "On The Rogue River"

The snails turned slowly toward the river,
toward the water-not-stone of the river.
We whirled till our feet refused,
curled to sleep while day met night,
sweeping away on cedar rafts,
a scattered flotilla of snails.

"D M Gordon's poems have a powerful strangeness of vision which derives, at least in part, from its rootedness in the ordinary. They are at once strong, delicate, precise in reference and resonance." --Michael Thurston, author of The Underworld In Twentieth Century Poetry

This event is free and open to the public. Please help us spread the word by forwarding to your friends.