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Concord Celebrates Women’s History Month!

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Flipping the Script: The Women of the Manse

These are the stories of the women of the Old Manse – vital, complex, and essential – who lived in the Old Manse from the time of the Revolutionary War through 1939. In this tour, we flip the script and explore the history of the Old Manse not from the perspective of a few famous men, but from the perspective of the many women who lived there and whose stories, often forgotten, shaped history and still resonate today.

Tour groups are set with a limited capacity and we recommend booking in advance to secure your spot.

Saturdays and Sundays at The Old Manse

 

 

 

Tender Sensibilities: Concord & Women’s History

Join historian Richard Smith and Nikki Turpin , President of the Robbins House, as they lead a lecture / discussion highlighting and celebrating a selection of women reformers from Concord history, including Ellen Garrison, Abba May Alcott and Helen Thoreau.

March 24, 12-1:30pm

Co-sponsored by the Friends of Walden Pond and Concord 250 Executive Committee.

Concord250.org

 

 

Women of the Great Field: The Robbins and Garrison Women and their Neighbors

March 26, 6-7:30pm

Join us for a Women’s History discussion with The Robbins House on the history of the women residents of the Great Field, a predominantly African American and indigenous area of Concord in the 19th century. Hear some of the stories and accomplishments of women like Lydia Bay, Fatima Robbins, Susan Garrison and others who lived and worked on the periphery of the town in the 1800s. This event is generously cosponsored by The Robbins House: Concord’s African American History and The Concord Free Public Library

Concord250.org

 

 

 

 

Concord Free Public Library

Author Talks with the Concord Women Writers: Short Stories

Each week this month the library is showcasing authors from Concord. These Women Writers share their work and experience as women creators. Read about the March 20th event with  essayist and short story writer Emily Rubin and short story and creative nonfiction writer Tracy Winn. 

 

Author Talks with the Concord Women Writers: Poetry and Children’s Writing

 

March 27, multimedia poet Ros Zimmermann, and systems thinker and children’s writer Linda Booth Sweeney will be the featured authors.

 

Events

Nine Ballot Questions. Two Hours. Let’s Go.

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Nine statewide ballot questions are headed to Massachusetts voters this November. If the thought of researching all nine has you wondering where to begin, we can help. Evan Horowitz, Executive Director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, returns to LWVCC to guide us through the questions and what a YES or NO vote would mean. Drawing on cSPA’s nonpartisan research, he will break down the proposals, the arguments on both sides, and their potential impact. Join us for a fast-paced, informative First Friday designed to help you head to the polls knowing what you’re voting on.

Book Repair Workshop

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Have a favorite book with torn pages, a loose cover, or minor binding issues? Bring it to our Book Repair Workshop and learn simple mending techniques with book conservator Luisa Granitto. Participants can bring one or two books for hands-on practice repairing torn pages and loose hinges using archival materials. You’ll also learn how to make an archival “phase box” to protect a family heirloom. Registration opens September 1st.

Concord Festival of Authors: Carla Kaplan, Author of Troublemaker

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Join Carla Kaplan for a discussion of her newest book Troublemaker: the Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.

Troublemaker tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death; this biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism.

Who could predict that a British aristocrat would so energize American antifascist and civil rights struggles that Time magazine would crown her “Queen of the Muckrakers”? Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was brought up by an eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Her beautiful sisters have been subjects of books and movies dedicated to their naughty, glamorous lives. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel’s life.

As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mold. Instead of settling for life as a professional Beauty, she fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became an American Communist and pioneered witty, hugely popular journalism, including her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death.

Decca dedicated her life to social justice and proved herself an immensely effective ally, but she also injected laughter into all her political work, annoying some activists with her relentless antics but encouraging many others to find joy in the struggle. From famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock to best friend Maya Angelou, her anti-authoritarian irreverence had a profound impact on American culture.

Mining extensive, untapped sources, and with nearly fifty new interviews, Kaplan’s passionate biography beautifully illuminates how Decca’s hard-won and self-taught social empathy offers a powerful example of female freedom, the dramatic, novelistic story of an extraordinary woman of her time who is remarkably relevant and resonant today.

Bio: Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University. She has published seven books, including Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters—both New York Times Notable Books—and has written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Slate, andThe Nation.

Kaplan has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities , among others. She serves on the board of Biographers International Organization and isa Society of American Historians Fellow. Kaplan earned her PhD in English from Northwestern University. She divides her time between Boston and Cape Cod.

For more information, please visit https://carlakaplan.com/.

To learn more about the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.

Concord Festival of Authors: Steve Edwards, author of Rare Good

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Join Steve Edwards, the 2025 Concord Free Public Library Writer-In-Residence, for a discussion of his new book Rare Good: Essays on Art Autism, and Astonishment.

Steve Edwards was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties, altering his relationship to writing and family. He discovered what he had always known but never said: His compulsion to create was more than just a pursuit of self-expression. Faced with a mix of belief and disbelief from those who knew him, and full of questions himself, he committed to a new sense of wonder and pursuit of revelation.

​Rare Good offers insights into Edwards’s experience of the awe that only art, disability, and loved ones can bring. Raising a disabled child and delving into acknowledging his own mindedness, he explores the struggles of communicating and finding care, the joy of gathering as community, and the astonishing gifts that art and education offer us, especially when we acknowledge the contributions of disabled artists past and present. Drawing on times of heartbreak transformed into determination, Edwards describes his ongoing desire to find a way together. A singular work of lyric nonfiction, Rare Good is a reminder and balm for all who might feel different.

Bio: Steve Edwards is the author of the memoir Breaking into the Backcountry, the story of his seven months as caretaker of a remote homestead along the federally designated “Wild and Scenic Rogue River” in Oregon during the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. His second book Rare Good: Essays on Art, Autism, and Astonishment is forthcoming in October 2026. Steve’s essays have most recently appeared in The Yale Review, The Sun, Orion Magazine, Literary Hub, and Longreads. His essay “Yellow Band” was one of the most-read prose works in The Yale Review in 2024. He is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Fiction/Nonfiction. He was the 2025 writer-in-residence at the historic Concord Free Public Library. Steve lives in Metrowest Boston with his wife and son.

​Though the number astonishes him, Steve has been teaching college writing for twenty-five years, with stops along the way at Purdue University, Emerson College, Simmons College, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and, for more than a decade, he has been a professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. A highlight of his teaching career has been leading the original course Neurodiversity in Literature and Life at Tufts University’s Experimental College. Steve has led workshops with 27 Powers and Larksong Writers Place.

For more information, please visit https://www.steveedwardswriter.com/

For more information on the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.

Concord Festival of Authors: Steve Edwards, author of Rare Good

/in , /by

Join Steve Edwards, the 2025 Concord Free Public Library Writer-In-Residence, for a discussion of his new book Rare Good: Essays on Art Autism, and Astonishment.

Steve Edwards was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties, altering his relationship to writing and family. He discovered what he had always known but never said: His compulsion to create was more than just a pursuit of self-expression. Faced with a mix of belief and disbelief from those who knew him, and full of questions himself, he committed to a new sense of wonder and pursuit of revelation.

​Rare Good offers insights into Edwards’s experience of the awe that only art, disability, and loved ones can bring. Raising a disabled child and delving into acknowledging his own mindedness, he explores the struggles of communicating and finding care, the joy of gathering as community, and the astonishing gifts that art and education offer us, especially when we acknowledge the contributions of disabled artists past and present. Drawing on times of heartbreak transformed into determination, Edwards describes his ongoing desire to find a way together. A singular work of lyric nonfiction, Rare Good is a reminder and balm for all who might feel different.

Bio: Steve Edwards is the author of the memoir Breaking into the Backcountry, the story of his seven months as caretaker of a remote homestead along the federally designated “Wild and Scenic Rogue River” in Oregon during the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. His second book Rare Good: Essays on Art, Autism, and Astonishment is forthcoming in October 2026. Steve’s essays have most recently appeared in The Yale Review, The Sun, Orion Magazine, Literary Hub, and Longreads. His essay “Yellow Band” was one of the most-read prose works in The Yale Review in 2024. He is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Fiction/Nonfiction. He was the 2025 writer-in-residence at the historic Concord Free Public Library. Steve lives in Metrowest Boston with his wife and son.

​Though the number astonishes him, Steve has been teaching college writing for twenty-five years, with stops along the way at Purdue University, Emerson College, Simmons College, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and, for more than a decade, he has been a professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. A highlight of his teaching career has been leading the original course Neurodiversity in Literature and Life at Tufts University’s Experimental College. Steve has led workshops with 27 Powers and Larksong Writers Place.

For more information, please visit https://www.steveedwardswriter.com/

For more information on the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.

Concord Festival of Authors: Poetry Panel with Nate Klug and Catherine Stearns

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Join the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library for an in-person afternoon with poets Nate Klug and Catherine Stearns who will read and engage in a Q & A about their inspirations and craft.

Nate Klug reads from his collection, Hosts and Guests: poems. Klug is a poet and the author of Rude Woods, a modern translation of Virgil’s Eclogues (The Song Cave, 2013), Anyone (Chicago, 2015), and Hosts and Guests (Princeton, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by fellowships from the James Merrill House, MacDowell, and the Poetry Foundation. A Congregationalist minister, he works at the First Parish in Lincoln and lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

Catherine Stearns holds an MFA in Poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Brandeis University. Her first book, The Transparency of Skin (New Rivers Press), was selected as a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards, and a later chapbook, Then & Again, was published by the regional book-arts press, Slate Roof. Her most recent collection, Out Toward Morning, was released this fall by Grid Press. She taught writing and literature for many years at Belmont Hill School, where she headed the English Department, and was Writer-in Residence at the Roxbury Latin School before she retired. She and her husband, Richard Klug, live in South Natick, Massachusetts.

For more information about the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.

Concord Festival of Authors: Julie Carrick Dalton, author of The Forest Becomes Her

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Join author Julie Carrick Dalton for a discussion of her new book The Forest Become Her. This event is part of the 2026 Concord Festival of Authors.

“In historic, bucolic Concord, Massachusetts, a centuries-old forest has been removed to make way for a new, eco-friendly housing development. The locals are upset by the destruction, but out-of-towners like Hazel Stoddard are flocking to put down roots in their new guilt-free dream homes. Soon a tragedy leaves Hazel unmoored in her new life, and she begins to feel the pull of the absent forest. Hazel is not alone—her neighbors, real estate agent Stella Flint and teenage environmentalist Polly Bauer, each have their own traumas and their own relationship to the land. The three women are drawn together to save the last remaining oak tree, or they risk losing themselves to lingering shadows that only they can see.” In The Forest Becomes Her, Julie Carrick Dalton brings hope and reverence to this lush celebration of multigenerational female relationships, the ever-evolving female form, humanity’s connection to our changing world, and the mysteries that still exist in nature.

Author Bio: Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Forest Becomes Her, The Last Beekeeper, and Waiting for the Night Song. She is the winner of the New Hampshire Book Awards’ People’s Choice for Best Novel, and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, and the ASLE Book Award. Her novels have been named to Most Anticipated lists from CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others, and were selected as an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Book of the Month. A former organic farmer, forest manager, and beekeeper, and a TEDx speaker, she is a frequent speaker on the topic of fiction in the age of climate crisis at universities, museums, and conferences, nationally and internationally. She currently serves on the teaching faculty of Drexel University’s Creative Writing MFA program and is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard. When she isn’t reading or writing, you can probably find Julie kayaking, skiing, swimming, gardening, or trying to track down her four children and two dogs.

For more information, please visit https://juliecarrickdalton.com/

For more information on the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.