She is more violent than Lady Macbeth, more complex than Ophelia, more strategic than King Lear’s daughters. She is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life—from youth to old age—appears on stage. She is a wealth of insight into Shakespeare’s understanding of, and influence on, ideas of gender and sexuality, and she speaks by far the most lines of any of his female characters. She has allowed the likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren, and Sophie Okonedo full range for their stunning talents. Yet today, most audiences have still never heard of Margaret of Anjou. But who was Margaret? In the fifteenth century, she was a fourteen-year-old French princess married to an English king, soon thrust into command amid a bloody civil war. A hundred and fifty years later, she was resurrected on the Elizabethan stage in four of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. And in every era since the Bard’s, actors, directors, and producers have recast their own Margaret, slicing, dicing, and rearranging the original Shakespeare to highlight or diminish Margaret’s role depending on the sensibilities of the time. It is this evolution of Margaret’s portrayal that Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern track in Shakespeare’s Margaret, from Elizabethan boy-actors in wigs enacting misogynist fears of witchy women to feminist celebrations of Margaret’s uninhibited grasp of power and clever commentaries on global politics and world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher. Her story, as it has changed over the centuries across the page and on the stage, brings to life the evolution of theatre and shows how Shakespeare’s plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself, still unfolding.

About the Speaker

Charles O’Malley holds a doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama and has worked at theatres across the United States. He is the editor of Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance.

Scott W. Stern is a scholar and critic. He is the author of The Trials of Nina McCall, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas, which the Times called “powerful new history.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed Wuthering Heights. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë—an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s parsonage: writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors. As she traces the influence of Brontë’s life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë’s fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world. From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.

About the Speaker

Deborah Lutz is the author of six books, most recently This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life. A previous book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at Pennsylvania State University as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions—Jane Eyreand Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Natalie Dykstra grew up in the Midwest, first near the shores of Lake Michigan, then in a suburb west of Chicago. She received her undergraduate degree in Classics followed by graduate degrees in American Studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Kansas. She won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life as well as grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she was elected an honorary fellow in 2011. She received a 2018 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, published by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. This work also has been supported by the inaugural 2018 Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). She has served as a board member of BIO since 2020. She is emerita professor of English and senior research professor at Hope College, where she taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years. She lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Nationally known, the pastel portraits of newly married John and Abigail Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society are icons of early Federal history; yet accomplished and prolific as the artist was, Benjamin Blyth is largely unknown today. Other sitters painted or sketched by Blyth include the only known portraits of Dr. Ezekiel Hersey, whose bequest founded Harvard Medical School; Gen. Israel Putnam, hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill; and the family of Elias Hasket Derby, “America’s first millionaire.” Blyth is well represented in John Langdon Sibley’s multi-volume accounts of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Harvard graduates, which include nine Blyth portraits of subjects for whom no other image exists. He was an important, if under-recognized, contributor to the visual iconography of the era. Art historian Bettina A. Norton’s Benjamin Blyth: Salem’s 18th Century Limner in a Time of Radical Upheaval is a long overdue, definitive account of Blyth’s life and work. Included are 153 portraits (pastels, oils, miniatures and prints), more than twice the number previously known. A measure of Blyth’s talent is that a dozen had been attributed earlier to John Singleton Copley. Adding to the appeal of Benjamin Blyth, Norton’s astute assessments treat Blyth’s portraits as character studies rather than simple likenesses of the formidable figures who sat for him during this formative era of American history.

About the Speaker

Bettina A. Norton’s professional life has centered on American graphic arts and social history. Her interest in Benjamin Blyth developed when she was in charge of the print collection at the former Essex Institute, now incorporated into the Peabody Essex Museum. She is the author of Edwin Whitefield, Nineteenth Century North American Scenery (Barre Press, 1977) and numerous articles. A graduate of Wellesley College, she lives in Boston, in the house in which she grew up.

Our love of flowers and desire to be close to them has, across cultures and for millennia, created both landscapes and livelihoods. In this book, Christin Geall covers hot topics such as aesthetics, appropriation, fair trade, floriculture, globalization, indigeneity, modernism, seasonality, and tokenism—to name only a few of the over eighty entries presented here in an accessible A to Z format. In her inimitable style, Geall shares personal stories and ideas from growers and designers, weaving her narratives between art, ecology, and history to get readers truly thinking about their relationships to plants, gardens, and design.

About the Speaker

Christin Geall is an acclaimed writer, designer, and photographer whose work focuses on the intersections of nature, culture, and horticulture. She is the author of Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style. Following the success of her first book, she now turns her attention to our global relationships with flowers and plants.

Join us as Pulitzer Prize winning author Jayne Anne Phillips and award-winning novelist, Jessica Brilliant Keener read from their new books and discussed writing, memory, and the power of ritual.

Small Town Girls is Jayne Anne Phillips’ ninth book and first nonfiction title–a memoir in essays–in which she reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory. In her singular first-person voice, she brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her closeness with her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties among the women of the town, and offers insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. Phillips writes of her relationships with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries. Small Town Girls was Oprah’s #1 anticipated new book and is a Boston Globe bestseller

Jessica Brilliant Keener’s third novel and fifth book, Evening Begins the Day, interweaves the stories of two families in crisis–one dealing with marital infidelity, the other with an at-risk teenage daughter–with the ancient Jewish spiritual ritual called the Counting of the Omer. Told from multiple points of view, this multigenerational tale addresses intimate struggles with betrayal, anger, and shame and asks the question: can we heal from love’s deepest wounds? The novel follows a trajectory from isolation and despair to community and hope. Praised as “restrained and powerful” by the Jewish Book Council.

About the Speaker

Born and raised in West Virginia, Jayne Anne Phillips, at 26, published Black Tickets, a first book of stories that influenced a generation of writers and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Her first novel, Machine Dreams, was a finalist for the NBCC and was chosen one of twelve Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. A second book, Fast Lanes, a tour de force collection of stories told entirely in first person voices, preceded Shelter, in which the child characters, two sets of sisters and the young son of the camp cook, grapple with their parent’s secrets and their own intuitions, is set in a 60’s era Girl Guides camp deep in a forest primeval. MotherKind follows Kate through the first year of her infant son’s life and the last year she shares with her terminally ill mother. Lark and Termite, finalist for the National Book Award, the NBCC Award, and the Prix de Medici Etrangers (France), traces the magical connection between a soldier caught up in the Korean War, the disabled son he will never know, and Lark, a young girl who believes her brother Termite is deeply conscious of more than he appears to understand. Quiet Dell (a Publisher’s Weekly and WSJ Fiction of the Year), is a portrait of Depression-era America that follows the real-life saga of a 1931 serial murderer who used matrimonial agencies to seduce wealthy widows, but takes as its heroines the three children of an Illinois widow and the female reporter who won’t stop looking for them. Night Watch, awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, follows a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the apocalyptic, post-Civil War years in mountainous West Virginia. Small Town Girls, ‘a writer’s memoir’, the author’s first nonfiction book, was published to acclaim in 2026. The recipient of Guggenheim, Howard, NEA, and Rockefeller Fellowships, is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jessica Brilliant Keener‘s novel, Strangers in Budapest, (Algonquin, 2017) was an Indie Next pick, chosen as a “best new novel” by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Chicago Magazine, and landed on the Southern Independent Bookstore Assn. bestseller list. Her debut novel, Night Swim, was a national bestseller and called “moving” by the New York Times followed by her collection of award-winning stories, Women In Bed, praised by Publishers Weekly for its “ability to deliver as much exquisite detail as the stories’ brevity will allow.” National Book Circle Critics award winner, Edith Pearlman, lauded the collection by describing Keener as “a master of immediacy.” Keener’s fiction has been recognized in The Pushcart Prize under “Outstanding Writers.” She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant, creative writing scholarships from Wesleyan University, Brown University, and multiple fellowships awarded by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts as well as a fellowship in Women’s Leadership from the Omega Institute in NY. Her feature articles (more than 100) have appeared in The Boston Globe; O, The Oprah Magazine, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Lilith, Design New England, Writer’s Digest, and the award-winning anthology, Alone Together, Love, Grief, and Comfort in the time of Covid-19, winner of the Washington State Book Award. The Jewish Women’s Archive, The Jewish Community Voice, and The Presbyterian Outlook have included Evening Begins the Day on their 2026 Summer Books lists.

In historic, bucolic Concord, Massachusetts, a centuries-old forest has been removed to make way for a new, eco-friendly housing development. The locals are upset by the destruction, but out-of-towners like Hazel Stoddard are flocking to put down roots in their new guilt-free dream homes. Soon a tragedy leaves Hazel unmoored in her new life, and she begins to feel the pull of the absent forest. Hazel is not alone—her neighbors, real estate agent Stella Flint and teenage environmentalist Polly Bauer, each have their own traumas and their own relationship to the land. The three women are drawn together to save the last remaining oak tree, or they risk losing themselves to lingering shadows that only they can see. In The Forest Becomes Her, Julie Carrick Dalton brings hope and reverence to this lush celebration of multigenerational female relationships, the ever-evolving female form, humanity’s connection to our changing world, and the mysteries that still exist in nature.

About the Speaker

Julie Carrick Dalton has published more than a thousand articles in The Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, The Hollywood Reporter, Orion Magazine, Electric Literature, and other publications. A former beekeeper and organic farmer, she is a frequent speaker on the topic of writing fiction in the age of climate crisis and is a member of the teaching faculty at Drexel University’s MFA Program. When she isn’t reading, writing, or teaching, you can probably find her skiing, swimming, kayaking, working in her garden, or trying to keep track of her four children and two dogs.

Alex George is a writer, a bookstore owner, a lawyer, and the founder of the Unbound Book Festival. His novels include A Good American, Setting Free the Kites, and The Paris Hours, and have been translated into more than ten languages. In addition to his novels, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, LitHub, and numerous other publications. He teaches creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.

Consider feathers: They define birds’ wings, enabling flight. They insulate against cold. They repel water. They even control sound. And how feathers work is just one aspect of the wonders of birds explained by pathbreaking researcher and birder Lorna Gibson in Birds Up Close.

Feathers, bones, bills, eggs, flight: all come in for scrutiny in this engaging book. What produces the iridescence of plumage? How does the internal structure of a bird’s bones make them lightweight? How do different birds use their bills and tongues—from woodpeckers penetrating the holes they drill to hummingbirds imbibing nectar, to sandpipers needling the sand, and to phalaropes drawing water droplets containing plankton into their mouths without sucking (no lips!)?

Drawing on her expertise and personal experience in both engineering and ornithology, the author explores the hidden microscopic structures and engineering principles that keep birds aloft and alive—how an egg is formed, how a bird generates lift; how raptors soar and glide, albatrosses fly thousands of miles, hummingbirds hover, puffins and penguins “fly” underwater. She also considers the longer view of birds in their habitats and natural history. Her up-close look at avian mysteries provides a perspective like no other for the expert ornithologist and curious observer alike.

About the Speaker

Lorna Gibson is the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT as well as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT’s top award for undergraduate teaching, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

From the best–selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters comes the story of the American whaleship Mentor, wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. With supplies dwindling, the eleven surviving crewmen face not only the miseries of shipwreck in unfamiliar territory but also the profound uncertainty of contact with the Indigenous people of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau, who within days approach the deserted men brandishing axes, clubs, and spears. In this gripping saga of cultural collision, tribal wars, and dashed hopes, award–winning historian Eric Jay Dolin vividly reconstructs the Mentor’s doomed voyage, the years of perilous captivity, and the delicate negotiations and fraught naval rescue mission that followed. Illustrated by more than 100 images and maps, The Wreck of the Mentor is at once a powerful story of survival and a revealing window into the great Age of Sail―a time when maritime ambition collided with local sovereignty, and when the outcome of one voyage rippled across oceans and empires.

About the Speaker

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of seventeen books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America; A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes; Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates; and Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. Dolin’s books have won many awards including the John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award; National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award for Adult Nonfiction; Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature; James P. Hanlan Book Award; and the Outdoor Writers Association of America Book Award. Many of his books have been chosen as “must reads” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Other honors include being chosen as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and as one of the best books of the year by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, the Library Journal, and Booklist. Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

In 1909, America was home to 253 automakers, a landscape of visionaries, schemers, and would-be barons of the new century. But when playboy millionaire M. Robert Guggenheim announced an audacious “Ocean to Ocean” contest from New York City to the Seattle World’s Fair, only three companies were brassy enough to show up at the starting line: Acme, Ford, and Shawmut, a promising but star-crossed carmaker from Boston, trying to survive after a factory fire. Oddsmakers favored the Acme and Itala, a pricy import also joining the race, while dismissing the pint-sized Ford — a homely little number called the Model T— and the long-shot Shawmut. In fact, many didn’t believe any of the cars would reach Seattle at all, as they would need to forge a 4,106-mile course of mountain ranges, mud bogs, washed-out wagon bridges, and harrowing canyon trails, long before the era of asphalt highways, seatbelts, and service stations. But Henry Ford was intent on proving that the Model T could go the distance and beat out the muscular luxury cars—and he didn’t plan to leave it to chance. Indeed, a little over three weeks after the race began, a Ford crossed the line hours ahead of the Shawmut. Except that victory was a fraud. The Hardest, Longest Race is a colorful tale of ambition and subterfuge, but it is also a love letter to America at the turn of the Twentieth Century. As a seeming people’s champion—a car for the masses—traverses the vast nation, Moskowitz brings to vivid life the diverse populace and landscape that it would soon transform.

About the Speaker

Eric Moskowitz spent 12 years as a reporter at The Boston Globe, where he won the National Headliner Award for feature writing, shared in the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, and was one of the lead reporters on “The Valedictorians Project,” a Pulitzer finalist examining obstacles to college and career success for many top Boston Public Schools graduates. He has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times, and stories have been featured in The Best American Sports Writingand The Best American Newspaper Narratives anthologies. He recently started a new role as a staff writer at Harvard.

Doug Most is a lifelong journalist and author whose career has spanned newspapers, magazines, and universities up and down the East Coast. He was named Journalist of the Year while at The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, for his coverage of a tragic story about two teens charged with killing their newborn, a story he turned into a true-crime book titled Always in Our Hearts. After a stint at Boston Magazine, he worked for fifteen years at The Boston Globe as the Sunday Magazine editor, and deputy managing editor/special projects. His 2014 nonfiction book, The Race Underground, told the story of the birth of subways in America in the late 1800s and was adapted into a PBS/American Experience documentary. His latest book, Launching Liberty, tells the human story of the Liberty ships of World War II.

We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. On Instagram, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, lifestyle pivots, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, we’re surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin—and why do some transformations inspire us while others raise our hackles? Longtime New York Times Magazinewriter Benoit Denizet-Lewis, known for his deeply reported and psychologically rich journalism, takes us on a freewheeling, wild-hearted journey into the mystery of human transformation. He introduces us to an unforgettable array of people in flux—including psychedelic reality benders, sexual and gender transitioners, ideological shapeshifters, seemingly reformed murderers, and an octogenarian grandmother trying to change her temperament (“Better late than never!” she says)—as well as those working to engineer change: psychologists, neuroscientists, name-change specialists, even his own father, a breath and meditation teacher who once wrote a newsletter about “the art and science of transformation.” Intertwined with those portraits of change is the author’s own reckoning—by turns painful, poignant, and hilarious—with his misfires and epiphanies. You’ve Changed is a book for anyone who’s ever tried to become someone new, fix what felt broken, drag someone else into changing, or wondered whether real transformation is anything more than a myth we sell ourselves. Denizet-Lewis shows us that profound, positive change is possible—and offers an unexpected, sometimes counterintuitive set of approaches to help us get there. But this is no compass for the dogmatic or the quick-fix brigade. Change, he shows us, is slippery, scary, beautiful, often politically fraught—and best tackled with humility riding shotgun, holding the map upside down.

About the Speaker

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey. A New America Fellow and NEH Public Scholar, he divides his time between Boston and Prague.

Ellen Barry covers mental health for The New York Times. She was previously the paper’s London-based chief international correspondent and the bureau chief in New Delhi and Moscow, and a reporter for the Boston Globe.