CategoryReading Events

Gallery of Readers presents Lisa Ekus and Kathie Fiveash reading from their work.
Sunday, December 17 at 4 PM
Florence Civic Center
90 Park Street, Florence, 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, 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.

Lisa Ekus

Lisa Ekus majored in American literature at Barnard College (’79) and worked in a literary agency, followed by stints at Random House and Crown Publishers in Manhattan. She founded The Ekus Group, LLC in Hatfield in 1983, a full-service culinary agency. Lisa has represented a diverse selection of food personalities, writers, cookbooks, restaurants, and food products. She also is the proud owner of more than 7,000 cookbooks. The Guinness Book of World Records recently awarded Lisa the honor of having the largest personal cookbook collection in the world. Lisa is deeply committed to volunteerism and donates her time to several non-profit organizations in the hunger, health, and humanitarian arenas. .

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Kathie Fiveash

Kathie Fiveash divides her year equally between Northampton, Massachusetts and Isle au Haut, a remote, unbridged island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. She is a naturalist, writer, teacher, mother, grandmother, and a faithful friend. Her book Island Naturalist, a collection of essays about natural history on the coast of Maine, won the Maine Writers and Publishers John N. Cole award for Maine-based nonfiction in 2015. A recent book of poems, Human/Nature, was published in 2022. Both are available from Penobscot Books.

Sunday, November 19, 2023, 4 PM
Northampton Friends Meeting Hall 
43 Center Street, Suite 202
Northampton, MA

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

For those how 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.

Eileen P. Kennedy

Eileen P. Kennedy is the author of two collections of poetry: Banshees (Flutter Press, 2015), which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won Second Prize in Poetry from the Wordwrite Book Awards, and Touch My Head Softly (Finishing Line Press, 2021) which Literary Titan has described as “emotionally-charged poetry that explores life with observant poems that will appeal to anyone who loves inspired poetry.” It was a finalist for the International Book Awards in General Poetry. She lives in Amherst, MA with the ghost of Emily Dickinson. More at EileenPKennedy.com.

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Barbara A. Rouillard

Barbara A. Rouillard, of Springfield, Massachusetts, has over eighty-five publishing credits to her name and was the recipient of both a NEH Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. She received her MA in English in 2007. She was a special education teacher at West Springfield High School for thirty-two years. In her retirement, she studies French, writes, and travels with her husband William. 

Sunday, October 22, 2023, 4 PM
Northampton Friends Meeting Hall 
43 Center Street, Suite 202
Northampton, MA

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

Julie G. Olmsted

Julie G. Olmsted has been a writer, preacher, runner, meditator, theologian, comic, and ponderer of life since age three. She has been an ordained minister since 1991, serving UCC churches in New York, Ohio, Connecticut and now Massachusetts, where she has lived with her genius musician/composer husband Jeff since 2010. She is in transition from interim ministry to writing, speaking and her life coaching practice, vitalspiritcoaching.com.

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Jonathan A. Wright

Jonathan A. Wright of Northampton, retired Founder and Senior Advisor at Wright Builders Inc. in Northampton, is a 1974 graduate of Hampshire College, a published poet and author, and consults and presents on sustainability. His poetry  collections include After the Rain (Gallery of Readers Press 2014) and Season of Dreams ( Brook Hollow Press 2017), as well as four chapbooks.  Living Building Makers was released by Ecotone Publishing in September 2019.

Reading and Book Signing

October 7, 2023, 5 PM
Florence Civic Center
90 Park Street
Florence, MA

Free and open to the public.

Suzanne M. Smith

Suzanne M. Smith’s devotion to her writing life has, until now, been a well-kept secret. She has worked for many years in data analysis and program evaluation, with a focus on equity in higher education and social services. Currently, she is Director of Research and Evaluation as Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. She was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of eight children in a lively, warm family, the source of her Ag and Gunner memoir. Ms. Smith earned her Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Smith College, and her Master’s in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has raised two sons, Jack and Liam. She currently lives in the hills of Western Massachusetts, drawn there by her love for green open spaces and big skies.

The Zoom meeting opens at 3:45 pm on Sunday, April 23, 2023. — Elizabeth and Barbara will each read for about 30 minutes.

Contact Robin or Carol — or one of the readers — for secure access to the zoom link.

Please arrive before 4 p.m. as no one will be admitted once the reading begins.

Elizabeth Resnick

Elizabeth Resnick is a chef, farmer, and writer based variably in western Massachusetts and upstate New York, although in past iterations she has also worn the hats of international peacebuilder, immigration paralegal, literary agent’s assistant, and costume designer. She holds a BA in Middle East Studies from Brown University and her writing has been published by Peace Insight, Sonima.com, Common Ground Blog, and The Brown Daily Herald. When not procrastinating with knitting, candle-making, fermenting large vats of vegetables, yoga, or reading other people’s writing, she is in the process of editing her first novel. 

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Barbara Lucey

A Holyoke native, Barbara Lucey spent her young working life in film production. Based in California and New York, she traveled to locations throughout the US and in Europe. Upon returning to Massachusetts, she specialized in nonprofit financial management at The Food Bank of Western Mass and the Five College consortium. She’s been writing since producing her first play at age 9. Barbara is the author of Meet Jimmy Fox for young readers, with illustrations by Nancy Haver, from Gallery of Readers Press. Her fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies and she was awarded an OCARC writer’s residency in a Provincetown dune shack. These days Barbara is a part-time nonprofit financial consultant and editor. She loves to sing jazz standards and currently is studying jazz improvisation and theory.