Upcoming Author Events & Readings
17 upcoming author events and readings from Concord Free Public Library, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All readings in Greater Boston →
Thu Oct 8 · 6:00pm
Emily Martin discusses her novel Winner Takes All with the library’s Meet Cute romance book club. Talent scout Eleanor Thompson wakes in Las Vegas married to Adam Shaw, the rival who poached her top artist, with hours to undo it while both still court the alt-rock band Dempsey. Martin, who lives in Boston, previously wrote the young adult novels Five Ways to Fall Out of Love and The Year We Fell Apart.
Thu Oct 15 · 6:00pm
Carla Kaplan discusses Troublemaker, her biography of Jessica “Decca” Mitford, the aristocrat who fought fascism in Spain, became an American Communist and wrote the 1963 exposé The American Way of Death; Time called her “Queen of the Muckrakers.” Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern, drew on nearly fifty new interviews. Her earlier books include Miss Anne in Harlem and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.
Sat Oct 17 · 2:00pm
Three first-time authors talk about their debuts with moderator Danielle Bradley, the library’s 2026 writer in residence, whose own novel Crying in Baseball is due in 2027. The panelists are Abigail Savitch-Lew, author of the novel Livonia Chow Mein; Meghana Mysore, winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, who teaches English at Randolph College; and Laura Garden, a conservation biologist by training who works on a Massachusetts farm.
Mon Oct 19 · 6:00pm
Steve Edwards, the library’s 2025 writer in residence, discusses Rare Good, essays written after his autism diagnosis in his mid-thirties that move between raising a disabled child, his own mind and “the contributions of disabled artists past and present.” His first book, the memoir Breaking into the Backcountry, recounts seven months caretaking a remote homestead on Oregon’s Rogue River; his essays have appeared in The Yale Review and Orion.
Wed Oct 21 · 2:00pm
The Fowler branch’s Book-A-Mystery group, led by librarian Madeline, discusses The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton with its author, Jennifer N. Brown, who joins as part of the Concord Festival of Authors. The novel is “a dual-timeline murder mystery set in an English country manor,” in which an ambitious professor discovers the long-lost manuscript of a Reformation-era prophetess. No registration is needed.
Thu Oct 22 · 6:00pm
Willie Mae Brown reads from My Selma, stories of her childhood in Selma, Alabama, told through her twelve-year-old self as the voting-rights movement and the 1965 Edmund Pettus Bridge march unfold around her family; in one, she hears Martin Luther King Jr. speak in defiance of a court injunction. Brown left Alabama at seventeen for Brooklyn and began writing these stories in 2012. The Robbins House presents the event.
Fri Oct 23 · 1:30pm
Tara Lynn Masih discusses The Silent Women, her first novel for adults, which follows a woman named Song from the dust bowl through the making of the atomic bomb to post-war Florida, a story of “courage, clandestine love, war trauma, and resilience.” Masih, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, wrote My Real Name Is Hanna and founded the Best Small Fictions series.
Sat Oct 24 · 8:30am
The Friends of the Library’s festival breakfast is a panel of novelists over a full buffet, moderated by Suzanne Koven, a Mass General primary-care physician and author of Letter to a Young Female Physician. Panelists include Christopher Castellani, whose novel Leading Men is being adapted for film by Searchlight Pictures; Gish Jen, whose sixth novel is Bad Bad Girl; and Hester Kaplan, author of Twice Born.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
Poets Nate Klug and Catherine Stearns read and take questions on their inspirations and craft. Klug, a Congregationalist minister at First Parish in Lincoln, reads from Hosts and Guests (Princeton, 2020) and has translated Virgil’s Eclogues as Rude Woods. Stearns, who headed the English department at Belmont Hill School, has a new collection, Out Toward Morning; her first book, The Transparency of Skin, was a Minnesota Book Awards finalist.
Mon Oct 26 · 6:00pm
Julie Carrick Dalton discusses her novel The Forest Becomes Her, set in Concord, where “a centuries-old forest has been removed to make way for a new, eco-friendly housing development” and three women are drawn together to save the last remaining oak. Dalton, a former organic farmer and forest manager, also wrote The Last Beekeeper and Waiting for the Night Song, and teaches in Drexel University’s creative writing MFA program.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:00pm
Novelists Jenn Bouchard and Kathleen Reidy read from new books with New England settings and talk about how place shapes their fiction. Bouchard wrote Palms on the Cape, about a Cape Cod beach-bar owner whose business is threatened by a visiting business-school group. Reidy, a Concord librarian, sets her first novel, Engineering a Love Story, among software engineers at the end of the dot-com boom.
Wed Oct 28 · 11:30am
Historian Brooke Barbier discusses Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution, which argues that the colonists’ culture of drink and taverns helped foster the rebellion against Britain. The library’s monthly nonfiction book club, Fowler in Fact, moves from the branch to the Wright Tavern for this festival session; copies can be borrowed beforehand, and bought and signed at the event.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:00pm
Joseph Finder, Jule Selbo and Janet Raye Stevens make up the Friends of the Library’s annual crime-fiction panel. Finder has written 17 suspense novels, most recently The Oligarch’s Daughter, and saw High Crimes and Paranoia filmed; Selbo writes the Dee Rommel mysteries and was a television writer-producer; Stevens won a Daphne du Maurier award for A Moment After Dark. Kate Flora, author of twenty-four books, moderates.
Sat Nov 7 · 6pm
Daniel Shealy, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, gives this year’s Joel Myerson Lecture, “‘I turn my adventures into bread and butter’: Louisa May Alcott’s European Grand Tour.” Shealy has published thirteen books on Alcott, including Little Women: An Annotated Edition and, with Myerson, editions of her letters and journal; his Louisa May Alcott in Europe is due from Mercer University Press in 2027.
Tue Nov 10 · 6:00pm
Jay Vogt reads from A Walking Life: A Memoir in Seventeen Walks, including a six-mile Sunday loop from his Concord door past the Old Manse and the Old North Bridge into the Estabrook Woods, and pieces on the Camino and an alpine pass. Vogt, founder of the consulting practice Peoplesworth, then draws on forty years as a facilitator to gather attendees’ own walking stories. Registration opens October 10.
Thu Nov 12 · 6:00pm
Robert M. Thorson, professor of Earth sciences at the University of Connecticut, lectures and reads from The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau, which tells how Thoreau “resuscitated Walden with a sharp swerve toward science” and reads the book against climate change, water supply and technology. Thorson also wrote Walden’s Shore and The Boatman. The Thoreau Alliance and the Walden Woods Project co-sponsor.
Thu Nov 19 · 6:00pm
A panel on Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the reporter known for covering the 1893 Lizzie Borden trial, who became an editor, suffrage activist and mystery novelist. Sharon M. Harris, author of the new biography Her Life in Ink, joins Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan, editors of the Penguin Classics The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, and Betsy Devine, Jordan’s namesake and a Concord resident.
