CategoryReading Events

The Zoom meeting opens at 3:45 pm on Sunday, March 26, 2023. — Vanessa and Robin 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.

Vanessa Adel

Vanessa Adel is a writer, educator, and performer. A long-time adjunct professor in sociology, she recently left academia to pursue independent research and writing, community climate education, and performance. She is the 2021 recipient of a climate justice award for her poem, “Yes We Must” from the virtual symposium, Creative Women Leading Climate Action. She has been writing with Gallery of Readers since 2017, and lives in Northampton with her partner and their teens.

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Robin Barber

76 years ago, Robin Barber was born a quarter mile from his present home in Northampton, Massachusetts. He co-directs Gallery of Readers with his wife Carol. He’s led Monday morning and Wednesday evening writing workshops for nearly thirty years, and he feels lucky to live in such a vibrant community of talented writers. During the 1970’s back-to-the-land movement, Robin made his home in a remote mountain valley in British Columbia, Canada. He’ll read selections from his writing about this adventure.

A recording of the reading is available here.

Meryl Cohn

Meryl Cohn is a two-time semifinalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, a recipient of the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Playwriting Grant, a Lark Play Development Center semifinalist, and recipient of the Eventide Arts Kaplan Playwriting Award. She is the author of Do What I Say: Ms. Behavior’s Guide to Lesbian and Gay Etiquette, published by Houghton Mifflin, and a long-running humorous advice column about love, sex, and relationships. She lives in Northampton with her partner, the writer MB Caschetta, and their poodle, Baby Cass. 

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Nancy Barnes

Nancy Barnes was a devoted New Yorker for many years, teaching cultural anthropology and education at The New School and working in the “small school” reform movement in public high schools. Now she is happily living in Northampton, writing personal essays and stories. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, Public Seminar, Pangyrus and other journals.

A recording of the reading is available here.

Walker Resnick

Walker Resnick‘s work has appeared in UMass Jabberwocky and Landmark College Impressions. He is currently editing his first novel and teaching 7th and 8th grade English at Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley, MA. He lives in Amherst. 

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John M. Corbett

In his youth, John M. Corbett acquired the education of a working person and learned the lessons of parenthood. These experiences gave him the lens through which to see the world, and the language to speak of it. He writes fiction in order to relieve the alienation he feels knowing that most of the folly of life goes unnoticed. In addition, his fictional characters have their own agendas, a desire for existence and attention, and he wants to indulge them in that. John is the author of Bird Life (Gallery of Readers Press, 2017).

There is a video recording of the reading here.

Deborah Esther Schifter

Deborah Esther Schifter is a writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Most of her work has been in the field of mathematics education; Pearson, Heinemann, and Teachers College Press have published her books. Her personal essays have appeared in Solstice, Woven Tales Press, Hippocampus Magazine, and other publications.

Steffi Schamess

When Steffi Schamess is not writing, she is either worrying or bragging about her grandchildren, cultivating her fantasy of being the as-yet-undiscovered Grandma Moses of the writing world (while plugging away in Robin Barber’s writing workshop), participating in a most enjoyable and international group which gathers weekly on Zoom to read Shakespeare aloud, and traveling to visit far-flung relatives in Australia, Israel, Belgium and most exotic of all, Ohio.

There is a video recording of the reading here.

Richard McKeown

Richard McKeown is a visual artist and musician as well as a writer. He is recently retired from a long career working with people with substance use disorders. As he began to explore in writing his mixed feelings about retirement, the narrative quickly changed course when he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. He plans to read a short piece about a bad childhood experience at Mama Leone’s famous Italian Restaurant in New York City during a trip to the 1964 World’s Fair with his family, and from his memoir of Parkinson’s, tentatively called “Shoulder Season.” During this COVID season he hunkers down at home in Southampton with his wife Carolyn, dog Jonas, cat Max, and turtle Zeke. Words to live by for Rich are, “You can never have too many guitars”. He has eleven.

Kathie Fiveash

Kathie Fiveash is a naturalist and writer who divides her year equally between Isle au Haut, a remote island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, and Northampton Massachusetts. 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. Her new book of poems, Human/Nature, published by Penobscot Books, is available now from the publisher.