“Glitter Road”: A Reading and Conversation with January Gill O’Neil

From Massachusetts Center for the Book: Join the North Shore Community College Lynn Campus Library for an afternoon with January Gill O’Neil, author of Glitter Road, a Massachusetts Book Awards Honors title in poetry. O’Neil will read from her celebrated collection, speak about her writing process, and share insights into her approach to crafting poems before opening the floor for an audience Q&A. She will also lead a brief writing prompt for anyone who would like to participate.

Glitter Road opens in the wake of loss, deep pain, and anger, yet the poems insist on finding flashes of celebration and joy—even if that joy is simply, in the spirit of Lucille Clifton, “what i have shaped into / a kind of life,” the triumph of survival and self-recognition. With formal dexterity and richly charged syntax, O’Neil’s poems resist the silences of fear, grief, desire, and anxiety, speaking aloud what is so often left unspoken in both private and public life. Her interrogations of race thread through the collection, shaping a speaker whose history—personal and collective—unfolds with carefully rendered detail.

This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

JANUARY GILL O’NEIL is a poet and author of Glitter Road, Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other publications. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others. O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and lives in Massachusetts.

More about the event by clicking here.

To learn more please email info@massbook.org