9th Annual Women’s Reading

On May 22nd, 2025, the WCPA is proud to host its annual Women’s Zoom Reading. If you would like to attend, please CLICK HERE.

Here is the reading list & order of readers:

1. Lex Thomas: Aided and abetted by careers in federal politics, symphony musicianship, public relations, a history of family mental health issues, and several decades of life lived across several borders, Lex continues to sort out the whole mess through words. Her favorites are “jumbo” and “expunge.”
2. Cheryl Bonin is a bourbon sipping, baseball watching, pirate loving, Neil Diamon singing, cancerous wench of the breast variety who writes snark filled stories and poetry because it’s cheaper than therapy.Her rantings have been encouraged, tolerated, published and/or acknowledged by:her Good Sport Hubby, random unsuspecting open mic attendees, The Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, The National Baseball Poetry Festival, The Eastport (Maine) Library Review and the 2022 Frank O’Hara Poetry Contest. Cheryl is currently doing her damndest to outrun the devil and get her debut book of poetry and personal essays entitled: “Impressive, but not in a good way.” out into the world while she’s still vertical.
3. Polly Brown: spent the first two years of her retirement writing a blog about what she’d learned from teaching young adolescents,at ayeartothinkitover.com. Now she’s resettled an old family place in western Maine, where she’s happily raising poems. Pebble Leaf Feather Knife, from Cherry Grove Collections, followed two chapbooks, Blue Heron Stone, from Every Other Thursday Poetry, and Each Thing Torn from Any of Us, from Finishing Line. Recent poems have appeared in Appalachia, Canary, Hole in the Head Review, and Quartet Journal, among others
4. Ger Duffy: lives in Southeast Ireland.  Her poetry has been published by PNR(UK),, Poetry Ireland Review, Under the Radar (UK), The Ekphrastic Review, (US),  Southword, Wild Greens (US) and other literary magazines. She is a Pushcart nominee. She has been awarded two poetry mentoring awards.  Her poems have been anthologized in Local Wonders, Washing Windows 111, In the Gold of the Flesh, The Stony Thursday Book. Her poems have been placed or commended in the following competitions: Goldsmiths International, Travels with Joyce, Write by the Sea, The Francis Ledwidge Awards, The Allingham.  She was a selected poet to read at the launch of On Being with Padraig O Tuama at the Southbank.  She was a featured reader at the Verve Poetry Festival, UK.
5. Claire Golding is a freelance writer and editor. She was the 2003 recipient of the Worcester County Poetry Association’s Frank O’Hara Prize, and has self-published a chapbook, Poems and Other Offerings (Lulu Press, 2009). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been published in The Worcester Review, New Millennium Writings, Contour (as part of the 2017 Tale of Two Cities International Poetry Project with Worcester, Massachusetts and Worcester, England), The Scenes and Seasons of a Small New England Village, Penning the Pandemic, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. She lives in Princeton, Massachusetts.
6. Sharon Harmon: has chapbook Wishbone in a Lighting Jar (Flutter Press). She has been published in Compass Roads, The Aurorean Silkworm, Green Living, The Patterson Literary Review and many other publications. She is also a freelance writer and is the author of two new children’s books. She lives in the woods of Royalston.
7. Carolyn Howe lives in Worcester, MA, where she has been writing poetry and painting in watercolor since her retirement from College of the Holy Cross.  She is a member of the Worcester County Poetry Association and the Rosemont Poetry Workshop.  She has published in The Worcester Review, the poetry anthology The Senior Class, and has a chapbook called Across the Street.
8. Em Judkins:  is a queer poet based in central and Western Massachusetts. The assistant head of poetry at Emulate Magazine, they are the recipient of the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize and Ruth Forbes Eliot Prize, and their work has appeared in Emulate, Voices and Visions, and the Worcester Art Museum. They currently study English and Film and Media Studies at Smith College with a concentration in poetry, and are at work on their first chapbook.
9. Irena Kaçi: is a poet and writer living in Worcester, MA with her spouse and two children. She moved to Worcester in 2015, almost a decade after graduating from Clark University. She writes for Pulse Magazine, and is a Poetry Editor In Residence for the Worcester Writers’ Collective. Her creative work has appeared in the Worcester Review, Atticus Review, Blue Mountain Review and others.
10. Elizabeth Lund: is the award-winning host of Poetic Lines at NewTV. The show features in-depth interviews with emerging and established poets about their work and creative process. She also interviews poets and reviews major collections of poetry for The Christian Science Monitor, where she served as poetry editor for 10 years. From 2015 to 2020, Elizabeth wrote a monthly column about poetry for The Washington Post. Elizabeth co-directs Haiku Newton, which began in 2022 and brings haiku on lawn-style signs to venues around Newton. Her own poems have appeared in various publications including The Dalhousie Review, Connecticut Review, The Christian Century, and the Patterson Literary Review. “Un-Silenced” is her debut collection. Elizabeth has read or spoken at festivals and venues along the East Coast including the Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry festival in the US, and the Gaithersburg Book Festival. With all of her projects and endeavors, Elizabeth aims to help people discover how poetry can enhance their daily lives.
11. Maura MacNeil: is a writer, editor, and professor of creative writing. She is the author of the poetry collections: A History of Water (Finishing Line Press), Lost Houses (Aldrich Press) and This Last Place (Dancing Girl Press). She is the founder and editor of the literary website Off the Margins (www.offthemargins.com) featuring women writers who fearlessly tell the truth and risk vulnerability to give voice to their experience.”
12. Andrea MacRichie has lived, worked and traveled to many places. Art historian (docent at MMA), WW1 buff, Queen fan, YNWA, Scentwork with Field Spaniels, Canadian-American, gardener, underwriter at heart, later a library dean. younger than I look. Hope I have more furloughs in my race, so much still to  learn, so much still to write.
13. Sandy Monfredo
14. Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks, including, most recently, Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023).
15. Catherine Reed: is an ordained minister and poet.. She is the author of four books of poetry. Crossing Boundaries, Between Midnight and Dawn, Sankofa and Fire Goes Out Without Wood.
16. Eve Rifkah: was co-founder of Poetry Oasis, Inc. (1998-2012), a non-profit poetry association dedicated to education and promoting local poets. Founder, and editor DINER, a literary magazine.She is the 2021 recipient of the Stanley Kunitz award. She lives in Worcester, MA. The play, Outcasts the Lepers of Penikese Island, was based on her first book. She has 6 published books, none self-published.
17. Seher Sayed
18. Nancy Baillie Strong lives in Manchester, NH. When cleaning out her parents home in 2019, she discovered that her mother had kept a not-very-good poem written by Nancy when she was 10 years old. She began writing poetry more seriously in the early-1990’s, and workshopped with Jim Beschta at the Worcester (MA) Art Museum from 2012-2018. She has participated in the Monadnock Poets annual retreat, and workshops with several other fine poets in Susan Roney O’Brien’s virtual workshop. Her poetry has been published in The Poets’ Touchstone, Smoky Quartz, and was included in the anthology Women’s Uncommon Prayers (2002). Her poem “Four Corners, Cambridge and Southbridge Streets” was selected by Worcester’s Poet Laureate Oliver de la Paz as one of two dozen winners in the “Poems in and out of Places” contest of the “Mapping Worcester in Poetry” project of the Worcester County Poetry Association..
19. Heather Treseler:is also the author of Parturition, which won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Harvard Review, The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, and PN Review. Her essays appear in Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in eight books about American poetry. Recipient of the W. B. Yeats Prize, Frontier Poetry’s prize, and the Editors’ Prize at The Missouri Review, she is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.
20. Rhett Watts: has lived in Beirut, San Francisco, New York and Connecticut. She now lives beside a brook south of Worcester with her husband and Siberian cat. Some of her poems have appeared in Sojourners Magazine, The Worcester Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Canary, San Pedro River Review and in the books The Best Spiritual Writing 2000, and The Mud Chronicles: A New England Anthology. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Rhett’s chapbook No Innocent Eye was co-winner of the Rane Arroyo Award from Seven Kitchens Press. Her books are Willing Suspension, The Braiding, and coming in 2025 The Double Nest. Rhett facilitates AWA (Amherst Writers & Artists) writing workshops well as SoulCollage workshops in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
21. Eleanor Wilner: is the 2019 Frost Medal recipient of the Poetry Society of America for lifetime achievement, is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Before Our Eyes; New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017  and Gone to Earth: Early & Uncollected Poems 1964-1975. 
22. Susan Roney O’Brien:  earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She’s published two chapbooks: Earth and Farmwifeand three full-length poetry collections: Legacy of the Last World, Bone Circle and Thira. Nominated for numerous Pushcart Prizes and published widely, she works with the Worcester County Poetry Association, runs a monthly on-line poetry reading series and facilitates free poetry workshops through area libraries. She, her husband Philip. and Oliver, their Chocolate Lab, live in central Massachusetts.