Saturday, Apr. 23 | 1pm | Main Street Church | 320 N. Main St 

International bestselling author Don Winslow has written over twenty novels, including The Border, The Force, The Kings of Cool, Savages, The Winter of Frankie Machine and the highly acclaimed series The Power of the Dog. His latest novel, City on Fire, hits shelves in April 2022.

The son of a sailor and a librarian, Winslow grew up with a love of books and storytelling in a small coastal Rhode Island town. He left at age seventeen to study journalism at the University of Nebraska, and traveled extensively. He moved to New York City to become a writer, making his living as a movie theater manager and later a private investigator in Times Square. He left to get a master’s degree in Military History and intended to go into the Foreign Service but instead joined a friend’s photographic safari firm in Kenya.  He led trips there as well as hiking expeditions in southwestern China, and later directed Shakespeare productions during summers in Oxford, England. (more…)

Saturday, Apr. 23 | 2:30pm | Chelsea First United Methodist Church | 128 Park St. 

Ashley C. Ford (photo credit Heather Sten) is a writer, host, and educator who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, seasons one & three of MasterCard’s Fortune Favors The Bold, as well as the video interview series PROFILE by BuzzFeed News, and Brooklyn-based news & culture TV show, 112BK. While working as an executive for Matter Studios, Ford focused on developing web series and documentaries.

(more…)

Saturday, Apr. 23 | 4pm | Washington Street Education Center Auditorium | 500 Washington St

Appearing in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, Billy Collins is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” He was the United States Poet Laureate from 2001–2003. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.”

(more…)