Present Time: Readings from the T.S. Eliot House Poets
Featuring Kristin Prevallet, Hoa Nguyen, Erika Meitner, and Maria Sledmere
Date: Thursday, June 19, 2025
Time: 5:00 – 6:30 PM
Location: Rocky Neck Cultural Center, 6 Wonson Street, Gloucester, MA
Admission: Free, RSVP is appreciated
RSVP Contact: tseliotfestival@gmail.com
Join us for a powerful evening of contemporary poetry as four distinguished poets from the T.S. Eliot House Residency Program gather to share their work. Present Time offers a rare opportunity to experience the voices shaping the landscape of modern poetry—each poet bringing a distinctive vision and lyrical force to the stage.
This event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited; RSVPs are appreciated.
Featured Poets:
Hoa Nguyen
Author of several acclaimed poetry collections, including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008, and Violet Energy Ingots—a finalist for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her sixth book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Nguyen currently teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University and mentors’ writers at Guelph University and the University of Toronto.
Maria Sledmere
A poet and scholar based in Glasgow, Scotland, Sledmere is director of SPAM Press and Senior Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Her many publications include Languishing, cute (with Ian Macartney, 2025), Midsummer Song (2024), Cinders (2024), and An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (2023). Her work explores ecopoetic, dream logic, and experimental lyricism.
Erika Meitner
The award-winning author of six poetry collections, Meitner’s Holy Moly Carry Me won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent work, Useful Junk (2022), examines intimacy, embodiment, and digital life. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her next collection, Assembled Audience, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2026.
K (Kristin) Prevallet
A poet, essayist, and scholar based in Gloucester, MA, and the current Residency Administrator of the T.S. Eliot House. Prevallet has published seven collections, including A Varied and Tender Multiplicity: A Materia Medica of Plants, Poems, and Spells (Station Hill Press). Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Harvard Review, Boston Review, and Peripheries.
The Shape of Abstraction: Tracing a Visual Revolution
Presented by Adria Arch
Wednesday, June 25, 7 pm
The Cultural Center at Rocky Neck
6 Wonson Street, Gloucester, MA 01930
Offered in conjunction with The Shape of Things, on view at The Cultural Center at Rocky Neck, June 5 – July 13, 2025
The Shape of Abstraction is an image-based discussion about the language of abstraction: how Western art history came to embrace abstraction, and how it manifests itself today in contemporary art. Boston artist and educator, Adria Arch, will discuss early practitioners including Hilma Af Klint, Kandinsky and O’Keeffe, through the abstract expressionists like Pollock and Krasner, and to contemporary artists who enliven today’s conversations with their own take on this style of artmaking.
This visually rich presentation will trace abstraction’s radical departure from representational traditions, examining how artists began to express emotional, spiritual, and intellectual concepts through non-objective forms, colors, and compositions. Arch will highlight pivotal moments when artists broke from convention to develop a new visual language that prioritized formal elements over literal depiction.
Special attention will be given to pioneering women abstractionists whose contributions were often overlooked in traditional art historical narratives. The lecture concludes with an exploration of how contemporary artists continue to push the boundaries of abstraction, incorporating new technologies, cultural influences, and conceptual frameworks that revitalize this enduring artistic approach.
About the speaker
Adria Arch is a Boston-based sculptor, painter, and installation artist who has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, and in Auvillar, France. Her work is included in many private and public collections including the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Danforth Art, and the Fitchburg Art Museum, as well as Fidelity Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. In 2019 her work was featured at the Fitchburg Art Museum, and in 2020 at the Cahoon Museum of American Art. Most recently, Arch was commissioned by Google to create a permanent room-sized installation. Arch has shown at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Brattleboro Art Museum in Vermont and the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA. This year, she will present solo exhibitions at Lake George Arts Project and at San Luis Obispo Art Museum in California. Arch has taught at Montserrat College of Art, Endicott College and Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has lectured at the Danforth Museum, the Weston Arts and Innovation Center Women in Installation series, and the Boston Sculptors Gallery.
About Rocky Neck Art Colony
The Rocky Neck Art Colony (RNAC), a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization, nurtures excellence in the arts through exhibitions, workshops, residencies and vibrant cultural events for its members and the public. On picturesque Rocky Neck in Gloucester, Massachusetts, RNAC operates three exhibition spaces, open to the public for free, The Cultural Center at Rocky Neck (6 Wonson Street); The Salted Cod Arthouse (53 Rocky Neck Ave.), a partnership gallery and café; and Cove Gallery (37 Rocky Neck Ave.), open seasonally in the former gallery of local artists Gordon and Judith Goetemann. Check the website, www.rockyneckartcolony.org, for hours, openings and special events. For more information, see the website or call 978-515-7004.
Good Morning Gloucester 