Poetry Reading: Regie Gibson & Lloyd Schwartz

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.

Regie Gibson is Massachusetts's first Poet Laureate, appointed in 2025. He is an accomplished poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator who currently serves as the Co-Artistic Director of Pedagogy at the Arts for Social Change. He is also an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on performance and spoken word poetry, and an Instructor at Clark University in Worcester, where he teaches the introduction to poetry. His poems for public occasions engage complex historical and social issues, inviting audiences into the dialogue with hope and often humor. He is intentional about using poetry to create common ground and foster social cohesion. 

Regie is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, was selected one of Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry.  He has co-judge the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition  with Marc Smith and Mark Strand, has been regularly featured on N. P. R. and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.

Regie has toured with the Chicago Mask Ensemble, performing dramatic and poetic adaptations of common myths from around the world. He founded the LiteraryMusic Ensemble Neon JuJu: a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing classic, contemporary and original literary text combined with Middle Eastern, Contemporary American and European classic music.

Regie is widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals such as The Iowa Review, Harvard Divinity Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Spoken Word Revolution (Source Books), The Good Men Project and several others. His full-length book of poetry Storms Beneath The Skin (EM Press) was published in 2001 and received the Golden Pen Award. In 2005 Regie was a featured on the PBS Arts magazine- Art Close-Up and was subsequently nominated for a Boston Grammy. Regie has received his MFA in Poetry from New England College, and continues to facilitate creative writing workshops, performances, and otherwise augmenting literary curricula for high schools and colleges across the United States.

Lloyd Schwartz (Sam Cornish Award winner) is a poet and scholar. In his poems, Schwartz often uses a conversational frame to explore intimate and familial relationships. His collections of poetry include Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (2021), Little Kisses (2017), Cairo Traffic (2000), Goodnight, Gracie (1992), and These People (1981). His poetry has also been featured in the anthologies Best American Poetry (1991, 1994, 2019), The Best of the Best American Poetry (2013), and Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (2009). Schwartz is the editor of Prose: Elizabeth Bishop (2011) and coeditor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (1983) and of the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008).
 
Schwartz also served as the classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix. Three-time winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor Awards, he has received a Professional Music Fraternity’s Radio and Television Award as well as support from the Amphion Foundation. Music In—and On—the Air (2013) offers a selection of his classical music criticism for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air.
 
Schwartz’s poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize. Additional honors include a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Somerville Arts Council, an Associates of the Boston Public Library Literary Lights Award, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. Schwartz has served on the executive board of PEN New England and is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he has served as director of the creative writing program. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was the Poet Laureate of the City of Somerville from 2019 to 2021.

Fees

This event is free to attend.

Location

Latitude and Longitude 42.376962, -71.126381

Schedule

Event Type

• Partner Program
• Performance