St. John’s Church in Ashfield is pleased to announce that January Gill O’Neil will be the featured reader for the Ninth Annual Ann Hutt Browning Poetry series. The reading will be held on Saturday, May 11, at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Church, Ashfield.  In addition, the Ann Hutt Browning Youth Poetry Contest winners will read their prize-winning poems at that time.

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Rewilding (fall 2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), published by CavanKerry Press. Her poem “Hoodie” recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine.  She is an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and from 2012-2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles also appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and Ecotone, among others. In 2018, January was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Sarah Browning, Ann’s daughter and founding director of the Split This Rock Poetry Project in Washington, D.C., whose recent collection of poetry is titled Killing Summer, will also speak at the reading. Judges for the Youth Contest include poets Susie Patlove, Marie Gauthier, and former Browning winner, Henry Lombino, a former Browning contest winner.

The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for signing, courtesy of Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls. Refreshments will be served.  This program is supported in part by grants from the Ashfield, Buckland, Charlemont/Hawley, Deerfield, and Plainfield local cultural councils, local agencies which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.