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Your Papers Please by Judy Lewis

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Judy Lewis

Judy Lewis

Judy Lewis moved to Northampton from Phoenix, Arizona three years ago, at the beginning of winter during the pandemic. She started writing poetry as a way to make sense of this experience. A visual artist, she has also had a long and varied career in healthcare as a Nurse Practitioner and in community public health. Of her 45 years in nursing she says, “My biggest regret is that I never wrote any of it down.”

Reading Events

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May 17, 2025: Leo Hwang and Jennifer Jacobson

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Gallery of Readers presents Leo Hwang and Jennifer Jacobson reading from their work.

Saturday, May 17 at 4 p.m.Forbes Library (Coolidge Room)
20 West Street
Northampton, MA

Free and open to the public. Please come join us, all are welcome!

For those who can’t or prefer not to attend in person, Forbes Library will livestream the reading at https://forbeslibrary.libcal.com/event/14146815. Forbes will archive the livestream so we will post a link to it after the reading.

Leo Hwang

Leo Hwang’s work has appeared in Human Being & Literature, Meat for Tea, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Fiction, Gulf Coast, and other literary magazines. He was the recipient of the Rosselli/de Filippis Scholarship at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been awarded scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Mr. Hwang received his B.A. in English and Fine Arts from the University of the South, and an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts in Geosciences with a focus on the diverse community economies of artists and artisans in Franklin County. Mr. Hwang is currently the Associate Dean of Inclusive Excellence in the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He also plays guitar in two bands, Vimana and The Warblers, and bass in the Original Cowards.

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Jennifer Jacobson

Jennifer Jacobson

Prose writer, teacher, and storyteller, Jennifer Jacobson’s work has been published in the Master’s Review, Chronogram, Linea, Switch, jubilat, Storyteller Magazine and elsewhere. Her stories received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train, Hunger Mountain, Symphony Space, and the Tennessee Williams Festival. Born in Zomba, Malawi, Jennifer now lives in western Massachusetts and works at UMass Amherst. She served as the Associate Director of the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institutes from 2014 to 2022. She is currently the English Department’s Director of Community Engagement. Her favorite summer activity (after baking berry pies) is teaching creative writing at Smith’s pre-college program which she has been delighted to do since 2014.

Podcast: A Picnic in the Woods by Norma Roche

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Norma Roche

Norma Roche

Norma Sims Roche grew up on Cape Cod, but has lived in Northampton since graduating from UMass in 1977. She recently retired from her work as an editor of college textbooks on biology and geology, through which she learned many amazing things about our planet, and even remembers a few of them. She is grateful to all the attendees at Robin Barber’s Wednesday workshop, who have told her wonderful stories and kept her writing over the last 15 years. She writes mainly memoir, personal essays, poems, and fiction based on true events. She will paddle into her retirement years keeping the advice of her whitewater kayaking instructors in mind: “Keep your hips relaxed, lean downstream, and look where you want to go.”

April 13, 2025: Opal Gayle & Rachel Hass

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Gallery of Readers presents Opal Gayle & Rachel Hass reading from their work.
Sunday, April 13, 2025, at 4 PM

Florence Civic Center
90 Park Street
Florence, Massachusetts 

Free and open to the public. Please come join us, all are welcome!

For those who can’t or prefer not to attend in person, a Zoom session will be available from 3:45 p.m. EDT on the day of the reading. (Be aware no admittance to the Zoom session after 4:05 p.m. for security purposes). Contact Robin or Carol — or one of the readers — for secure access to the zoom link.

Opal Gayle

Opal Gayle grew up in rural Jamaica. She is the recipient of the 2019 St Botolph’s Club Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and a finalist in the 2021 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writers Fellowship. A member of Gallery of Readers, Valley Society, and Boston Writers of Color, she writes memoir, essays, short stories, and poetry. Her personal essays have appeared in the Write Angles Journal, WOW: Women on Writing, Stargazing Stories, and Switch.  She lives in New England where she works as a world language teacher. Follow her on instagram @opalgayle78.

Rachel Hass

Rachel Hass has published short stories in The Louisville Review, The Jabberwock Review and The Vermont Literary Review. An excerpt from a longer work of fiction Sand, was selected for an honorable mention in the Santa Fe Writer’s Project Literary Awards Program. Currently at work on a novel set in Berlin during the Second World War, the story is based on parts of her own German Jewish family history and inspired by her great-grandfather, who hid throughout the war, and survived, and helped other Jews to hide. Born in London, and raised in Cambridge, MA, Rachel Hass first came to Western MA to attend Hampshire College where she studied writing with Nina Payne and Andrew Salkey. A graduate of the MFA in writing program at Vermont College, Rachel has lived in Northampton for more than 30 years.

Podcast: Purloined Poesy by John Broglio

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John Broglio

John Broglio

John Broglio was called out by a high school teacher for having “the greatest trove of useless knowledge I have ever encountered.” This was in a class in Homeric Greek, so the teacher could be judged a trivia expert. A classical education in high school and a concentration in German and French literature in college were overshadowed by time spent in theater and performing arts. After co-founding a couple of exciting but short-lived theater troupes, the author gravitated into translation and then into computer work, earning a Computer Science MS in computational linguistics. He abandoned his doctoral program when he realized he would rather spend those years writing a novel (which he characterized as “intentional fiction” as opposed to the unintentional fiction of any dissertation he might have written). He first discovered Shakespeare in the back seat of a car, when he found Romeo and Juliet in his older brother’s literature textbook while carpooling to high school. He sheltered a secret passion for the plays and poems through all the experimental theater movements of the sixties and seventies.

In John’s chapbook Towards the Pebbled Shore, he imagines an aged Shakespeare dictating stories from his life to a young scribe. Broglio vividly portrays the people and conditions of Elizabethan London, as recounted by the old bard from his retirement in Stratford.

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Gallery of Readers