Physicist-Author Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Novelist Catherine Newman Highlight Festival on Saturday, April 4
The Exeter Literary Festival returns April 4 for a daylong celebration of New England’s rich literary history. The free event brings together authors, poets, and readers for public events throughout the day at Exeter Town Hall in downtown Exeter from 12 – 5 pm. The Festival opens with a commissioned poem by Boston poet Durane West and features keynote talks by physicist and author Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and novelist and memoirist Catherine Newman.
The festival highlights writers from Exeter and across the region through readings, conversations, and panel discussions that explore literature’s power to illuminate—from the cosmos to the complexities of everyday life.
“The Exeter Literary Festival celebrates the long literary tradition of Exeter and the New England region,” says Katie Adams, chair of the Exeter Literary Festival committee. “By bringing together established and emerging writers and poets, we hope to create a space where people can experience the power of language, ideas, and storytelling.”
The schedule of events includes:
- 10 am: Reading with picture book author and Illustrator E.B. Goodale at the Exeter Public Library, 4 Chestnut St.
- Noon: Poetry reading by Durane West, poet and descendant of Exeter abolitionist poet James Monroe Whitfield, at Exeter Town Hall. West’s poem was commissioned in honor of America 250.
- Noon: Keynote by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, in conversation with Dr. Summer Merrill.
- 1:30 pm: Writing the American Story: Historians Brooke Barbier, Kabria Baumgartner, and Caleb Gayle.
- 1:30 pm: Conversation with Poets Sara Deniz Akant and Myles Taylor, hosted by Diannely Antigua, featuring poets from Exeter High School. Held upstairs in Exeter Town Hall.
- 2:45 pm: Worlds on Fire: Climate and Fiction with Julie Carrick Dalton, Nick Fuller Googins and Andrew Krivak.
- 4 pm: Keynote by Catherine Newman, author of Sandwich and Wreck, in conversation with novelist Lara Prescott.
Author/Poet Biographies
A descendant of Exeter abolitionist poet James Monroe Whitfield, Durane West was nominated in 2022 and 2024 for Spoken Word Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards. His poem 617, centering the experience of a black Boston resident was featured and published for the City of Boston in 2021.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She conducts award-winning theoretical physics research on dark matter, the early universe, and neutron stars, while also researching Black feminist science studies. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and a 2022 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. A columnist for New Scientist and Physics World, she is originally from East L.A., California, and now divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Catherine Newman is the internationally bestselling author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, the kids’ craft book Stitch Camp, the best-selling how-to books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, the novel We All Want Impossible Things, and the novels Sandwich and Wreck, which were both instant New York Times bestsellers. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She writes the Crone Sandwich newsletter on Substack and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
An award-winning public historian, Kabria Baumgartner works with numerous local historical organizations. In 2021, she co-founded the award-winning Newburyport Black History Initiative (NBHI), an organization that highlights and incorporates Black history into the public landscape in downtown Newburyport. In 2019, she published her first academic book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, which tells the story of Black girls and women who fought to democratize public education in the nineteenth-century Northeast. She is finishing her second book, Striving for Justice: Black Youth and Civil Rights in Boston, which explores the intellectual roots of Black youth organizing for racial justice in early Boston. She is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Northeastern University.
Brooke Barbier received her PhD in American history from Boston College. In 2013, she founded Ye Olde Tavern Tours, a popular outing that takes guests into historic sites and taverns to learn about Boston’s revolutionary and drunken history. She is the author of Boston in the American Revolution: A Town Versus an Empire and the award-winning King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father. Her next book, Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution, releases this June and examines the influence of alcohol on the creation of the U.S.
Caleb Gayle is a professor at Northeastern University, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead Books). Black Moses was a finalist for the New England Book Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, among others. He is also the author of We Refuse to Forget, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, the Oklahoma Book Award, and longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award.
Andrew Krivak is the author of five novels, two chapbooks of poetry, and two works of nonfiction. His 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and the inaugural Chautauqua Prize. He followed The Sojourn with The Signal Flame (2017), a novel The New York Times said evoked “an austere landscape, a struggling family, and a deep source of pain” in Krivak’s fictional Dardan, Pennsylvania. His third novel, The Bear (2020), received the Banff Mountain Book Prize for fiction and is a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title. Like the Appearance of Horses (2023), returns to the characters and landscape of Dardan. His fifth novel Mule Boy is forthcoming with Bellevue Literary Press in 2026.
As a poet, Krivak has published the chapbooks Islands (1999), and Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves (2021). He is also author of the memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (2008), and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912 (2009), which won the Louis Martz Prize for scholarly research on William Carlos Williams.
He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, an MA in philosophy from Fordham, and a PhD in literary modernism from Rutgers University. Krivak lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
He is currently the visiting lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University.
Nick Fuller Googins is the author of the novels The Frequency of Living Things and The Great Transition. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Men’s Health, The Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine and works as an elementary school teacher. He is a member of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, as well as the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States.
Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Forest Becomes Her (July 2026), 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, and the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. Her novels have been named to Most Anticipated lists from CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others. A former organic farmer, forest manager, and beekeeper, and a 2026 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.
Myles Taylor (they/he) is a Boston-based transmasculine writer, organizer, educator, Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, and glitter enthusiast. They are the current curator of the historic Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge and former President of the Emerson Poetry Project. They have been performing and representing Boston at slam tournaments and festivals internationally for over a decade. Their debut collection, Masculinity Parable (Game Over Books, 2023) was shortlisted for the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. Their publications can be found at myles-taylor.com, and their neuroses can be found @mylesdoespoems.
B. Goodale is an award-winning illustrator, printmaker, and storyteller whose work explores themes of community, curiosity, and our inherent connectedness with nature. She has illustrated many picture books and is the author/illustrator of the “Robin’s World” series, the first of which isRobin and the Stick, in addition to The Moon Remembers, Under the Lilacs, and Also. Her first picture book, Windows, written by Julia Denos, received an Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Honor. Many of her books have accumulated accolades and awards including Junior Library Gold Standards, ALA Notables, among others. E. B., a resident of Salem, MA, also designs a branded line of stationery products for letterpress company, Smudge Ink, which are distributed worldwide. Her designs are licensed with Postable.com and have been featured in Real Simple Magazine.
About the Exeter Literary Festival
Since 2019, the Exeter Literary Festival has highlighted the depth and breadth of literary talent in the Exeter, NH, area and hosted authors and poets from around northern New England. Events are held the first weekend of April in Exeter’s historic Town Hall and are always free. The Festival is a 501C-3 non-profit. For updates on the 2026 Exeter Literary Festival, visit www.exeterlitfest.com; Facebook and Instagram.
