Monthly Poetry Readings

Join upcoming readings, register for the Zoom broadcast, and watch past readings.

Amesbury’s Monthly Poetry Reading Series is hosted by Lisa Usani Phillips, Amesbury’s current Poet Laureate, in partnership with the John Greenleaf Whittier Home. During the summer, readings are held in the garden at the Whittier Home, 86 Friend Street, Amesbury, as well as broadcast virtually on Zoom.

Readings are broadcast via Zoom all year round.

Live poetry, every month

Next Reading: Jennifer Jean and M.P. Carver

When: Thursday, August 28, 2025 | 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Where:
JG Whittier Home & Museum, 86 Friend Street Amesbury, MA 01913 or Zoom

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. Along with Iraqi poet Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, she's co-written and co-translated a correspondence in Arabic and English poems, titled Where do you live? أين‭ ‬تعيشين؟. (Arrowsmith, 2025). As well, she’s the editor of the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo, 2026). Her work appears in POETRY, Rattle, On the Seawall, The Common, and the Los Angeles Review; as well as on The Slowdown Podcast and in the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” series. She’s received honors from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is an organizer for the Her Story Is collective, a faculty member at the Solstice MFA, and a senior program manager at the Fine Arts Work Center. For more information, visit: www.jenniferjeanwriter.com

M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA.  She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and teaches creative and digital writing at Salem State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Mantis, Jubilat, and Love’s Executive Order, among others. She has received funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Essex Community Foundation. In 2023 her poem "In Vitro" was named a finalist in the Connecticut River Review's Experimental Poetry Contest, and in 2022 her poem “You & God & I” was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize.  Her chapbook, Selachipmorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015, and a chapbook with Lily Poetry Review Books, Hard Up, was released in early 2025.

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Watch past readings on YouTube

Click an image below to watch the recording.

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