Chelsea Dodds
Chelsea Dodds is the author of the poetry chapbook Nothing Good Will Get Away, published by Finishing Line Press in 2026. Her writing has appeared in The Forge, Maudlin House, and Rejection Letters, among others, and she was a 2025 literary arts resident at Craigardan. A graduate of Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program, she lives in CT where she teaches high school and is working on a novel.
About Chelsea’s Book
When the speaker in NOTHING GOOD WILL GET AWAY meets a real-life version of the love interest she has written into all of her stories since she was a teenager, she must wrestle with whether this is a fated relationship or a chance encounter that will make for a good story but leave her heartbroken. From the Adirondack Mountains in New York to Steinbeck Country in California and back to the East Coast, these narrative poems explore love, longing, loss, and what it means to let oneself be truly vulnerable.
Joan Lilly
Joan Lilly grew up in Brooklyn and spent much of her working life in publishing, including many years as a reader for a literary agent. After earning a degree in social work from Fordham University, she worked for Victim Services in New York City and, after moving to the North Country twenty-five years ago, for High Peaks Hospice and Essex County Mental Health. A lifelong writer and runner, she lives with her wife and two dogs on an unpaved road in Wadhams, where she gardens and organizes the weekly Visibility Team protests in Keene Valley.
Joan’s book, Hair in Several Parts, will make its debut at the reading! Here’s an excerpt, the first piece:
How it Begins
Like most people who soundly smash a composite paddle into their own face while playing a heated game of platform tennis, I waited several weeks before going to the doctor. Well after the glory of my black eye had faded, its continued droopiness distressed my spouse enough that I was pushed to seek a medical opinion. My droopy eye did not impress the doctor. A diagnosis of poor decision making while fielding a lob—my doctor is a player himself—still left me vulnerable to the dreaded charge of hypochondriasis. I was glad therefore to have a second complaint to offer and mentioned that I’d been bothered by a “weird feeling in my throat.” He obligingly took a look and, without much deliberation, intoned that I needed to see an Ear Nose Throat doctor. The Ear Nose Throat doctor also only needed a look to see that I almost certainly had cancer. With these two “mouth open wide pleases,” a secret my body had been harboring was released. I closed my mouth and began to swallow the news.
But the following is not about me, it’s about my hair.
Come to the reading to find out more!
Lauren McGovern
Lauren McGovern mostly identifies as a writer, but often experiments with old postage stamps, watercolors, and portraits of mossy rocks she photographs on hikes to design collages. Her nonfiction and artwork has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, What’s Your Grief, The Razor, Adirondack Life, MUTHA Magazine, WOW! Women on Writing, The Sunlight Press, and elsewhere. When she’s not in her studio, Lauren works part-time at the Lake Placid Public Library, leads writing workshops, and presents about post-traumatic growth.
Read Lauren’s inventive story, “Omissions,” in The Brooklyn Review