Gallery of Readers presents Don Wheelock and Janine Roberts reading from their work.
Sunday, October 20, 2024, 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.
Janine Roberts
Janine Roberts, Professor Emerita, UMass, Amherst and former President, American Family Therapy Academy has authored 4 books including The Body Alters (chapbook with Slate Roof Press), others with HarperCollins and Norton Press, and over 70 personal essays and articles. An editor of four different journals, she has edited (in varied settings), thousands of papers, book chapters, dissertations, and poems. Her most recent op-ed in the Hampshire Gazette is entitled, Unraveling My Own White Supremacy. A native of Washington State, relocated to Leverett, MA via Kuwait, Mexico, Ghana, and other countries, she works with community groups on projects such as the Leverett Poetry Boxes, the Native Names boxes for Kestrel Trust, and most recently with students at Leverett Elementary on Flora and Fauna boxes out on hiking trails. Her creative programs often include community workshops on writing poetry. Her current favorite role is as Nene, grandmother to Cadence.
Don Wheelock
Composer Donald Wheelock, Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor Emeritus of Music at Smith College, began writing poems in his twenties, often for the purpose of setting them to music. Many of his poems soon declared their independence from that purpose, however. In the last few years he has revived some of those early poems to add to the many he has recently written, successfully submitting them to publications that welcome formal poetry. His chapbook In the Sea of Dreams is availablethrough Gallery of Readers Press. It’s Hard Enough to Fly, his first full-length book of poems, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. His second full-length book, With Nothing but a Nod, appeared last spring from David Robert Books. Wheelock’s poems are reflective formal structures depicting landscapes, familiar experiences, and everyday encounters from the vantage point of a man later in life. Fanciful observations of the workings of the natural world rub up against memories of problematic human interaction. Words and music mingle here. Wheelock lives with his wife Anne in an old house on the edge of a hayfield in Whately, Massachusetts.