Poetry Reading: 2023 Golden Rose Award with Gail Mazur

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.

In the case of inclement weather, poetry readings will be moved indoors. Concerts will be canceled or rescheduled.

The series is made possible with support from the Friends of Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters, New England Poetry Club, and the Berklee College of Music.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gail Mazur grew up in Auburndale, MA. Since the 1960s she has lived primarily in Cambridge and Provincetown, with periods in New York City, Houston and Los Angeles. In 1973, she founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Harvard Square which became, with its weekly readings, a center of poetry life, bringing national and international writers to read in a lively informal atmosphere.

As an activist with her late husband, the artist Michael Mazur and others Massachusetts writers and artists, she co-founded, in 1968, Artists Against Racism and the War, and later they were activists for a Nuclear Freeze. Blacksmith House presented benefit readings for, among other issues, the fight for AIDS research.

Her first collection, Nightfire (David Godine Publishers) was published in 1978, followed by The Pose of Happiness (Godine, 1986), The Common (University of Chicago , 1995); They Can’t Take That Away from Me (Chicago, 2001) finalist for the National Book Award; Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems (Chicago, 2005), winner of The Massachusetts Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize; Figures in a Landscape (2011); and Forbidden City (Chicago, 2016). Her poems have been widely anthologized, including in several Pushcart Prize Anthologies, the Best American Poetry, Robert Pinsky’s Essential Pleasures. A graduate of Smith College, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was for 20 years Distinguished Senior Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate program and now teaches in Boston University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where she has served for many years on the Writing Committee.