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Rumi’s poems were meant to induce a sense of ecstatic illumination and liberation in his audience, bringing its members to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. They remain masterpieces of world literature to which readers in many languages continually return for inspiration and succor, as wellas aesthetic delight. This new translation by Haleh Liza Gafori preserves the intelligence and the drama of the poems, which are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.
“These stunning translations of Master Rumi, at once gustatory and spiritual, cut the gloom of our existential doings. Imperative now, as ever, to know this beauty and love.”
– ANNE WALDMAN
“Water is immediate and timeless. These poems imprint on the heart. To read these verses is to enter mystery and paradox, to be burnished by the sacred fire and broken open by the holiest dance.”
– SULEIKA JAOUAD
“Gorgeous, fluent, and faithful translations. Gafori renders Rumi’s voice on the page with an original integrity that is as skilled as it is unforgettable.”
– PADRAIG O’TUAMA
Haleh Liza Gafori is a performance artist, translator, vocalist, poet, and musician born in NYC of Persian descent. Her acclaimed book of translations, GOLD, Poems by Rumi was published by New York Review Books in 2022, and her second volume WATER was recently released on April 22, 2025, also by NYRB Classics.
A bicultural woman with ears tuned to the music of American free verse as well as to the subtleties of the Persian text, Gafori aims to transmit the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poems into contemporary American poetry. Gafori is a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts grant supporting the development of her cross-media performance piece based on GOLD. Weaving translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English, she offers audiences glimpses of the astonishing rhythm and wordplay of Rumi’s original text, while uncovering how deeply and urgently the poetry dialogues with our times. Gafori’s translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Palewell Press, and elsewhere.
Come join us for an author event with Maria Vetrano, author of QUEEN BESS: A Tudor Comes to Save America, in conversation with Melissa Ludtke, author of Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside.
QUEEN BESS introduces readers to Dakota Wynfred, a tech billionaire with a social conscience who lives in Cambridge and works in Charlestown. Dakota is convinced that the only way to save American democracy—and her cybersecurity company—from the U.S. president who is setting fire to the Constitution is to enlist a time-traveling Elizabeth Tudor. The action races ahead as Dakota and her hand-picked cohorts prepare Elizabeth for a 2028 presidential run.
About Maria Vetrano: Maria Vetrano tried to save the whales when she was nine-years old. It didn’t quite work. But that didn’t quell her desire to ease some of the world’s ills in some small way, even if only through fiction.
She lives with her human and animal family in Massachusetts and is the mother of one young-adult daughter. When she's not writing, Maria is principal of Vetrano Communications, the PR and marketing firm that she founded in 2004, which specializes in technology companies as clientele. Maria is also a lounge singer who’s entertained audiences in Boston, Cambridge, and Provincetown. With her wife, she founded Against the Tide, a fundraising event to fight breast cancer. She is a graduate of Colgate University with a B.A. in English Literature. She is represented by Maura K. Phelan of Green Light Literary + Media.
About Melissa Ludtke: In her award-winning journalism career, Melissa Ludtke reported at Sports Illustrated, was a correspondent at Time, and was the editor of Nieman Reports at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Melissa’s lifelong engagement with issues revolving around girls and women’s lives led her to write two books, On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America, and Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods.
Melissa’s new book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside (published August 2024 by Rutgers University Press), revisits her federal lawsuit, Ludtke v. Kuhn, which in 1978 secured equal access for women sports reporters. This meant women could interview players, coaches and the manager in the locker room, as male reporters had done for decades. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, MA. She is the mother of a young-adult daughter, Maya.
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The poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows reveal the ways in which the ordinary becomes family portraits, politically charged reports, and tributes to the unsung. Espada’s focus ranges from the bombardment of his family’s hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anti-colonial uprising to the murder of a Mexican man by police in California, from the poet’s adolescent brawl on a basketball court over martyred baseball hero Roberto Clemente to his unorthodox methods of representing undocumented migrants as a tenant lawyer. We also encounter “love songs” to the poet’s wife from a series of unexpected a bat with vertigo, the polar bear mascot for a minor league ballclub, a disembodied head in a jar.
Jailbreak of Sparrows is a collection of arresting poems that roots itself in the image, the musicality of language, and the depth of human experience. “Look at this was all he said, and all he had to say,” the poet says about his father, a photographer who documented his Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and beyond. The poems of Martín Espada tell Look.
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems, Jailbreak of Sparrows, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2025. His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry and a Massachusetts Book Award. His poetry collections from W.W. Norton includes Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/ Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Join us for a reading and conversation with Grace Talusan, author of the award-winning book, The Body Papers. This event is free and open to the public.
Reserve your free tickets here!
Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.
The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.
Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.
Grace Talusan (click for pronunciation) is an immigrant from the Philippines. She teaches nonfiction writing in the English Department at Brown University. She has received support from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Fulbright, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council with residencies at Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Mass MOCA, and others. The Body Papers won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and was recognized by the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center with the Beacon Award. Talusan graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Come join us for an author event with Woody Holton, author of Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, and Robert A. Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World.
About Woody Holton: Woody Holton’s 2009 book, Abigail Adams: A Life, which he wrote on a Guggenheim fellowship, won the Bancroft Prize. Holton is the author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the National Book Award. His first book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti award. He teaches Early American history, especially the American Revolution, with a focus on economic history and on African Americans, Native Americans, and women.
About Robert A. Gross: Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Minutemen and Their World (1976), which won the Bancroft Prize; Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988); and The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021). With Mary Kelley, he is the coeditor of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (2010). A former assistant editor of Newsweek, he has written for such periodicals as Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, and his essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The New England Quarterly, Raritan, and The Yale Review.
Author Ana Hebra Flaster will be presenting her memoir, Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town at Temple Isaiah.
After being kicked out of their Havana barrio, a young Flaster and her family had to rebuild their lives in New Hampshire while still holding onto the memories of their previous home.
Ana Hebra Flaster is a Cuban American writer and and activist for human rights in Cuba. She was nearly six when her family fled Cuba and settled in Nashua, New Hampshire. After graduating from Smith College and enjoying a career in software consulting, she began her writing career. Her writing about Cuba and Cuban Americans has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and elsewhere.
Children’s author Carrie Finison is coming to Maxima Book Center to read her latest book, Pigs Dig a Road! In addition to the storytime, Carrie Finison will be teaching kids about real trucks involved in road construction, singing a song about construction trucks, and providing coloring pages, construction vests, and construction hats.
A rhyming picture book featuring pig construction workers that’s perfect for fans of Good Night, Good Night, Construction Site.
Construction crew chief Rosie and her team are building a new road to the Hamshire County Fair. It’s time to put on hard hats and boots, grab their hammers and stakes, and, of course, bring out the big trucks: bulldozers, excavators, pavers, rollers, and more!
Unfortunately, work with Rosie’s crew doesn’t always go as planned, and Curly, Pinky, and Stinky end up making one huge mess. Rosie is there to save the day, but she can’t do such a big job all by herself. The county fair is starting soon, and there’s only one way to get the road done on time . . . teamwork!
Carrie Finison writes children’s books with humor and heart, including Dozens of Doughnuts; Lulu & Zoey: A Sister Story; Hurry, Little Tortoise, Time for School; and Don’t Hug Doug, which was named an ALA Notable Children’s Book in 2022. Her newest book is Pigs Dig a Road, a humorous story about road construction and teamwork. She lives in the Boston area. Visit her online at www.carriefinison.com , or follow her on social media @CarrieFinison.
Come meet Meredith Bergmann and some of the artists who created the new "Something Is Being Done" Monument at the Depot/Historical Society in Lexington Ctr @7PM. In partnership with Lexington Community Ed.
Meredith Bergmann’s preliminary sketch for "Something Is Being Done!" recognizes contributions made by bold Lexington women who, when faced with injustice or seemingly insurmountable obstacles, determined that “Something Must Be Done.” Visitors will be welcomed to stand amidst these courageous women, draw strength from them, and help lead the future!
Meredith Bergmann is an American sculptor, poet, and essayist whose work is said to "forge enriching links between the past and the concerns of the present." She studied at Wesleyan University and graduated from The Cooper Union with a BFA. For over 40 years, Meredith Bergmann has been making sculpture that deals with complex themes in an accessible, beautiful, and provocative way. Working within the tradition of narrative sculpture, she draws on her love of the history of art, literature, and mythology to make the past speak to the present. Blending the sensuality and power of representational sculpture with her own subtle sense of mischief, her work evokes multilayered responses. Meredith lives in Massachussets with her husband Michael Bergmann, a writer and director, and their son.
More than 40 years ago, Jon Waterman worked as a mountaineering ranger at Alaska’s Denali National Park. His 1983 patrol to the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic National Park sparked a lifetime fascination with the wild, remote regions of the North. Waterman has since embarked on scores of expeditions to the North, often traveling solo by boat and on foot to document the natural wonders and cultural heritage across Arctic North America.
After a long hiatus from the Noatak headwaters, he returned with his son in 2021, witnessing firsthand the effects of climate change that he chronicled in a New York Times story, “36 Years Later, the Climate Changes at This National Park Stunned Me.” Amid a river now flooded, overgrown with brush, and bereft of once-abundant caribou, he was deeply disheartened by the many transformations.
In 2022, Waterman took a final, extended expedition “into the thaw” with the professional kayaker and photographer Chris Korbulic to carefully document the environmental and cultural changes precipitated by the climate crisis. They covered more than 500 miles on foot and by packraft down the entire river, then up the coast, passing through three different National Park Service managed lands to meet with scientists, interview Iñupiat (the Alaskan Inuit), investigate the many impacts of the Arctic climate crisis, and celebrate the enduring wonder of this special place. This book will be available in bookstores on November 12th.
Jon found his calling as a writer while shooting photographs on expeditions more than four decades ago. Drawn to the physical challenge and peace he felt in the natural world, he continually fell short explaining this allure to others. The necessity of being fully present in the outdoors to witness beauty, and then to preserve the natural world, became essential to Jon. So he turned to writing to explain both adventure and conservation.
He has also shot and written television films, including “The Logan Challenge,” “Surviving Denali,” “Odyssey Among the Inuit,” “ANWR Trek," and "Chasing Water."
Jon is mostly known for his Northern explorations, detailed in many of his books and countless journals since 1978. Beginning in 2007, the rivers of the Southwest began to call, with an extended journey and National Geographic Society research projects. For two ambitious water and river conservation expeditions, he lectured extensively, produced a comprehensive river map and a photography exhibit, then published two books, Running Dry and The Colorado River.
Lexington's Marjan Kamali, our friend and a wonderfully inspiring author will be at the Depot @7PM to read from and sign copies of her newest book The Lion Women of Tehran. In partnership with Lexington Community Ed.
From the nationally bestselling author of the “powerful, heartbreaking” (Shelf Awareness) The Stationery Shop, a heartfelt, epic new novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.
Marjan Kamali is the award-winning author of The Lion Women of Tehran, an instant national bestseller, The Stationery Shop, a national and international bestseller, and Together Tea, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. She is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.
Sarah Carlisle from Rascal Relish will be at LexFarm from 5:30-7PM for a zero-waste cooking event.
"In challenge to the manufactured urgency and disconnection of the Anthropocene, a Rascal Relish offers comfort, nourishment, and an invitation to slow down through handcrafted, plant-infused products and services. By practicing reciprocity with the natural world, gratitude and frugality through purposeful reuse, and gentle self-sufficiency, my offerings act as a supportive resource to help you deepen your sense of self & place through reverence, curiosity, and connection." -arascalrelish.com
We will also be selling the book Perfectly Good Food.
Want to cook better while saving money and reducing your trash? Learn to eat less wastefully and more sustainably in this combination cookbook and field guide, full of ingenious use-it-up tips, smart storage ideas, and infinitely adaptable Hero Recipes. Whether you’ve got a lingering bunch of herbs or an abundance of summer tomatoes, Perfectly Good Food will help rescue everything in your fridge while getting a delicious dinner on the table quickly and easily—you’ll be inspired never to waste good food again.
Zelly Ruskin will be in the Book Center @7PM to read from and sign her new book Not Yours to Keep, that explores adoption, fertility, and motherhood. Perfect for fans of Little Fires Everywhere and The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave, just in time coincide with Adoption Awareness Month in November. Refreshments will be served.
Called a “sensational debut” by Rea Frey, this psychological thriller delves into themes of reproductive rights and healthcare, confronting the complexities that define family—or the risks that lose it all.
Zelly Ruskin is a former social worker and adoption consultant. She loves traveling with her family, is a (sometimes) artist, and is passionate about and volunteers for brain aneurysm awareness. She writes women’s fiction spiced with suspense about motherhood, relationships, loss and love. Zelly and her ridiculous doodle, Strudel, currently live in New York City.
Poet Li-Young Lee will be at the Depot discussing and signing his newest book The Invention of the Darling @7PM. In partnership with Lexington Community Ed.
Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee offers a revelatory volume of ecstatic poems that search out divine voices in the silences of life, love, and death.
Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China and relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959, the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and, after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.
Lee is the author of The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton, 2024); The Undressing (W. W. Norton, 2018); Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions, 1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award.
April 2024
April is National Poetry Month! Joining us are local poets Quintin Collins, Matthew E. Henry, and Sarah Kersey. Stop by our Lexington location on Sunday the 28th for a reading and discussion on their following books:
The Dandelion Speaks of Survival is Quintin Collins's debut poetry collection. The work celebrates the persistence of African Americans, and all people, to triumph in the face of systems that would restrict their growth.
Honor Book, 2023 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards, Poetry Category
In Claim Tickets for Stolen People, Quintin Collins embraces a range of poetic forms and registers to show the resilience of Blackness in a colonized world. The tension between mortality and vitality is ever-present, whether Collins is charting his daughter’s emergence into being, cataloging the toll of white violence, or detailing the exuberance of community, family, and Chicago and Boston life. In Collins’s hands, the world is exquisitely physical and no element is without its own perspective, whether it is a truck sheared by a highway bridge or bees working through the knowledge that humans will kill them, burn their homes, and steal their honey. All goes toward honoring Black grief, Black anger, Black resistance, Black hope—and the persistence of Black love.
This stunning new poetry collection by Matthew E. Henry (MEH), the Colored page, is a visceral meditation on the multi-layered experience of a Black body in educational spaces. Sprawling with metaphors and allusions to both the contemporary and the historic, Henry brings us an intense narrative chronicle of the speaker's life as student, educator, and finally as a writer. At the center there is a reckoning with the racism written into the pages of America, and Henry leads us from the microaggressions of educational oversight, to the horror of blatant dehumanization.
Join author Henry Grabar for a talk about how the search for parking has shaped our world, from affordable housing to the enviroment. The evening will also include a panel discussion and Q&A. You won't want to miss this!
In a beguiling and absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Slate staff writer Henry Grabar brilliantly surveys the nation’s parking crisis, revealing how the compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems— from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—and, ultimately, how we can free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
Henry Grabar is a staff writer at Slate who writes about housing, transportation, and urban policy. He has contributed to The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, and was the editor of the book The Future of Transportation. He received the Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for excellence in national reporting by journalists under thirty-five.
Joining us at our Lexington location is local author Cara Bean to discuss and sign copies of her book "Here I Am, I Am Me: An Illustrated Guide to Mental Health". Copies of the book are available for purchase ahead of the event at both our Arlington and Lexington locations, or can be special ordered by calling 781-457-6185.
Author-illustrator Cara Bean takes readers on an illustrated journey to the center of the brain in Here I Am, I Am Me. Each of the 9 chapters in this therapist-recommended book explores a different aspect of mental health, from the brain and the mind, to feelings and emotions. By portraying complex neuroscience concepts with a cast of illustrated characters (that represent parts of the brain), the book explains what is really going on in the reader’s head in an accessible, approachable way that ultimately serves to empower the reader.
Cara Bean is the author of Draw 500 Funny Faces and Features and taught art at Lexington High School in Massachusetts for twelve years. She has an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Washington in Seattle and received a certificate in cartooning from the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, Florida.
She provides interactive workshops on creativity with people of all ages and backgrounds in various public forums. Cara is passionate about drawing and believes that the simple act of doodling on paper can lead to the investigation of complex ideas.
When she is not teaching, she makes comics that delve into poetic self introspection, playful storytelling and topics relevant to teens and teaching. Cara is currently working on comics projects that speak directly to kids and address mental health. www.carabeancomics.com
Joining us at our Lexington location is local author Karen Samuelson to discuss her debut novel, Weaving Dreams in Oaxaca!
Weaving Dreams in Oaxaca takes you on a journey with three characters whose lives are riddled with secrets and dilemmas. Frankie, a New York City professional dancer needs space from her past and strong-willed mother to grapple with the decision of having a family or continuing in the spotlight. A personal revelation throws Professor Mac into an identity crisis and sends him to Mexico for answers. Enrique, a mechanic and DJ from Santa Ana struggles with the challenge of coming out as a gay man to a hostile father. This trio crosses paths in the cobblestone streets of Oaxaca where they weave complex friendships in a colorful tapestry of adventure, deceit, discovery, love and pain.
Karen Samuelson is a career/life coach and writer. She has written three screenplays, a play, several dramatic scripts for Sunburst Productions in NY, and the Teacher’s Guide for episodes of Degrassi Jr. High. She was a quarter-finalist in the Cynosure Screenwriting competition in 2015 and 2016 for her screenplay, Sanctuary. In 1987, she received a Certificate of Recognition from the City of Boston for producing City Roots, a documentary about high school dropouts. In 2018, Arlington Friends of the Drama stage-produced her play, Circling Back. She lives with her husband, son, and dog outside of Boston and spends quiet time in Vermont.
November 2023
Come on by the Depot to meet author Nuar Asadir, who will be doing a reading, signing copies, and discussing his book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation!
Join us at LHS to hear Dr. Sally Shaywitz read and discuss her updated edition of her book, Overcoming Dyslexia. Come by to hear an expert discuss the intricacies of identifying, understanding, and overcoming dyslexia; whether you're a parent of someone who struggles with dyslexia, have it yourself, or are just curious to witness a professional discussion on the affliction.