Writers Series: J.D. Scrimgeour and Rebecca Hart Olander

Salem State Professor J.D. Scrimgeour is the inaugural poet laureate of Salem, Massachusetts. He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent being Small, Rectangular, Reflected World (Nixes Mate, 2025). He’s also written two books of nonfiction, including Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. A longtime resident of Salem, Scrimgeour has written in many genres about the city. Mary Towne Eastey, an ancestor in his direct line, was put to death during the Salem Witch Trials. Another ancestor, Thomas Perkins, sat on the jury that found her guilty. His forthcoming multi-genre collection, Poet in High Street Park: Prose & Poetry for Modern Salem (Loom Press), is a love song to the city by a writer who has grounded himself in the everyday realities of living in it for the past 30 years, from playgrounds to classrooms to ballfields. It is testimony that, beneath the Halloween hoo-ha and the historical tours crowding the sidewalks, people live here. Finding the universal in the local, the book asks who we are and who we want to be.

Rebecca Hart Olander is a Women's National Book Association Poetry Award winner and the author of three poetry collections: Dressing the Wounds (a chapbook from dancing girl press, 2019), Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry and the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, and Singing from the Deep End (CavanKerry Press, 2026). Rebecca has taught writing at Amherst and Smith colleges, at Westfield State University, and through Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, and she works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.

Parking for this event is located in the F/C Lot on Loring Avenue directly across the street from Forten Hall.