The Jacob Edwards Library is pleased to present three Franco-American authors reading from their new books. Memoirist Charlie Gargiulo and poets Jeri Theriault and Steven Riel will discuss how their culture informs their creative writing. The authors, from Maine and Massachusetts, give voice to the strong presence of Franco-Americans throughout New England. All welcome! Please note the earlier start time of 6 pm.

There will be an opportunity to purchase books and have the authors sign copies.
 

Jeri Theriault’s recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review. She was a finalist for both the William Matthews Prize (The Asheville Poetry Review) and the Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, Plume, Résonance, Rust and Moth and many other publications. Her recent collections are Self-Portrait as Homestead, (M)other, and Radost. She is the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. Jeri, also a visual artist, lives in South Portland, Maine.

Self-Portrait As Homestead focuses on family and heritage, specifically the Franco-American culture the poet experienced growing up in Waterville, Maine. “Homestead,” a motif suggested by street addresses, becomes “household,” a woman’s place, and alludes to the confinement by role, home and religion of the women characters, and their pushing against those constraints. 

Leslie Ullman has this to say about Self-Portrait as Homestead:

These deft, spare poems reclaim the flare of self-ness that has been tamped in women over many generations, and their fresh wordplay and inventive forms make their renditions of grandmother, mother, and self-as-girl-morphing-to-elder all the more arresting. Every gesture flies off the page in its caress of language, also evoking the iconic loneliness of women in the speaker’s past and in history itself. The result? A redemptive empathy for self and ancestor, the well-earned gift of a generation of women who have paid the price of breaking free and now step forth to bear honest witness and break old patterns. Such stories cannot be told often enough. These poems do so bravely and in searingly honed phrases and images.

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Charlie Gargiulo Following the destruction of Lowell's Little Canada, Charlie Gargiulo grew up in public housing. After serving in the military, he graduated summa cum laude from University of Massachusetts Lowell. Gargiulo became a legendary community and human rights activist and stopped forced displacement efforts like Little Canada from happening to others. In 2019, he was honored by the International Institute as one of the 100 most important figures in Lowell history who has worked on behalf of the city's immigrant population.

“Legends of Little Canada is a memoir told through the eyes of a 13 year old Charlie Gargiulo, who in the 1960's watched an urban renewal plan destroy his world by forcibly displacing his family and friends from their poor but tight-knit French-Canadian neighborhood in Lowell. The book gives witness to the final days of the community around Moody Street that Jack Kerouac recalled in many of his Lowell stories.

Charlie Gargiulo paints a picture, a ‘bookmovie’ to use a Kerouac phrase, of this young kid, his friends, his band of brothers, creating their own magic in this gritty town of Lowell... I can put my hand on this old heart of mine and safely say Kerouac himself would have laughed and cried and absolutely loved this book.”

- Kevin Ring, founder and editor of Beat Scene Magazine

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Steven Riel is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Edgemere and Fellow Odd Fellow. His chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. He edits the Franco-American journal Résonance. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College.

Shapeshifting abounds in Steven Riel’s latest collection Edgemere, as this pro-feminist gay poet marshals a parade of female personas that includes Senator Elizabeth Dole, Joan of Arc, and The Supremes. Riel’s poems zigzag across liminal spaces not just between male/female and human/inhuman, but between those fallen from AIDS and survivors who grieve them. 

According to the award-winning poet Joy Ladin, “Steven Riel's Edgemere is gorgeous, heartbreaking, and witty—often at the same time. With exquisite precision and extraordinary musicality, Riel traces the shimmering, fragile webs of love, experience, and culture that connect us to one another. From the inner life of bullied “sissy boys” to the ravages of AIDS to inimitable pop culture reveries such as “In Search of Della Street,” Riel's language creates a poetic space in which the individual, sometimes idiosyncratic perspectives he explores open into vistas on what it means to be human.”