The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.
Regie Gibson is Massachusetts’s first poet laureate, appointed in 2025. He is a poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator who currently serves as the co-artistic director of pedagogy at arts for Social Cohesion. He is also an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on performance and spoken word poetry, and an instructor at Clark University in Worcester, where he teaches the introduction to poetry. His poems for public occasions engage complex historical and social issues, inviting audiences into the dialogue with hope and often humor.
Gibson is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion and was selected as one of Chicago Tribune’s Artists of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. He served as a judge for the Chicago Sun-Times’s poetry competition with both Marc Smith and Mark Strand, has been regularly featured on NPR, and has appeared on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.”
Gibson has toured with the Chicago Mask Ensemble, performing dramatic and poetic adaptations of common myths from around the world. He founded the LiteraryMusic Ensemble Neon JuJu—a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing classic, contemporary, and original literary texts combined with Middle Eastern, contemporary American, and European classic music.
Gibson is widely published in anthologies, magazines, and journals such as The Iowa Review and Poetry magazine. He is the author of the full-length book of poetry, “Storms Beneath the Skin” (EM Press, 2001). Gibson facilitates creative writing workshops, performances, and literary curricula for high schools and colleges across the United States.
Lloyd Schwartz, a Sam Cornish Award winner, is a poet and scholar. His numerous collections of poetry include “Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems” (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and “Little Kisses” (University of Chicago Press, 2017). His poetry has also been featured in the anthologies Best American Poetry (1991, 1994, 2019), The Best of the Best American Poetry (2013), and “Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud,” (W. W. Norton, 2009), edited by Robert Pinsky. Schwartz is the editor of “Prose: Elizabeth Bishop” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) and coeditor, with Sybil P. Estess, of both “Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art” (University of Michigan Press, 1983) and of Library of America’s “Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters” (2008).
Schwartz also served as the classical music editor of the alternative weekly newspaper Boston Phoenix. Three-time winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Awards, he has received a Professional Music Fraternity’s Radio and Television Award as well as support from The Amphion Foundation. Music In—and On—the Air (2013) offers a selection of his classical music criticism for the NPR program “Fresh Air.”
Schwartz’s poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize. Additional honors include a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Somerville Arts Council, an Associates of the Boston Public Library Literary Lights Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Schwartz has served on the executive board of PEN New England and is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he has served as director of the creative writing program. He was the poet laureate of the City of Somerville from 2019 to 2021.