Join the Newburyport Literary Festival as it celebrates its 19th year! Events will be hosted in various locations around Newburyport. To view the schedule of events, please click here.
The Newburyport Public Library will host the following events on Saturday, April 27th:
9:30 AM: Celebrations of the Season: A Conversation with Nina MacLaughlin
Nina MacLaughlin’s Winter Solstice: An Essay “takes your breath away with lyrical leaps across time and space.” MacLaughlin (Wake Siren: Ovid Resung; Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter and the companion to Winter Solstice, Summer Solstice) looks at the season through every lens, from hot chocolate to waiting until just the right moment to light a candle so a passing stranger might see it go on. In conversation with Josh Bodwell.
Presenter: Nina MacLaughlin
Moderator: Josh Bodwell
11:00 AM: Colonialism, Racism, and the Cosmos: A Conversation with Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s award-winning novel Digging Stars blends drama and satire in the story of a young graduate student who is poised to attain her dream of researching the cosmos but is plagued by anxiety attacks she calls “The Terrors” and forced to grapple with questions about the life and death of her late astronomer father. Tshuma will be in conversation with author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu (Drinking from Graveyard Wells).
Presenter: Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Moderator: Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
1:00 PM: Enlightened Transsexual Comix with Sam Szabo and Nikole Beckwith
In Enlightened Transsexual Comix, artist and Newburyport native Sam Szabo has created a world where a “raw, uncut heroine roams the wasteland in defense of trans rights and trans wrongs.” This subversive collection of work is “a psychedelic stew of social satire and gonzo gender theory.” In conversation with director, screenwriter, and playwright Nikole Beckwith.
Presenter: Sam Szabo
Moderator: Nikole Beckwith
3:00 PM: Perfect Murders and Twisted Trails
Join two contemporary mystery writers at the top of their game as they discuss their newest novels with local crime writer Connie Hambley. In Blood Sisters, Vanessa Lillie introduces us to a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women—one of whom is her sister. In The Kind Worth Saving, Peter Swanson brings us a private eye who starts to follow a possibly adulterous husband, but little does he know that the twisted trail will lead back to the woman who hired him. How do the authors’ visions of the perfect murder inform each mystery they write?
Presenters: Vanessa Lillie and Peter Swanson
Moderator: Connie Hambley
To request any titles featured in the Newburyport Literary Festival, please call 978-465-4428.