Poetry Reading: Regie Gibson & Lloyd Schwartz

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Clu......More

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.Regie Gibson is Massachusetts's first Poet Laureate, appointed in 2025. He is an accomplished poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator who currently serves as the Co-Artistic Director of Pedagogy at the Arts for Social Change. He is also an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on performance and spoken word poetry, and an Instructor at Clark University in Worcester, where he teaches the introduction to poetry. His poems for public occasions engage complex historical and social issues, inviting audiences into the dialogue with hope and often humor. He is intentional about using poetry to create common ground and foster social cohesion. Regie is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, was selected one of Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry.  He has co-judge the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition  with Marc Smith and Mark Strand, has been regularly featured on N. P. R. and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.Regie has toured with the Chicago Mask Ensemble, performing dramatic and poetic adaptations of common myths from around the world. He founded the LiteraryMusic Ensemble Neon JuJu: a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing classic, contemporary and original literary text combined with Middle Eastern, Contemporary American and European classic music.Regie is widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals such as The Iowa Review, Harvard Divinity Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Spoken Word Revolution (Source Books), The Good Men Project and several others. His full-length book of poetry Storms Beneath The Skin (EM Press) was published in 2001 and received the Golden Pen Award. In 2005 Regie was a featured on the PBS Arts magazine- Art Close-Up and was subsequently nominated for a Boston Grammy. Regie has received his MFA in Poetry from New England College, and continues to facilitate creative writing workshops, performances, and otherwise augmenting literary curricula for high schools and colleges across the United States.Lloyd Schwartz (Sam Cornish Award winner) is a poet and scholar. In his poems, Schwartz often uses a conversational frame to explore intimate and familial relationships. His collections of poetry include ARTUR SCHNABEL AND JOSEPH SZIGETI PLAY MOZART AT THE FRICK COLLECTION (APRIL 4, 1948) and other poems (2025), Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (2021), Little Kisses (2017), Cairo Traffic (2000), Goodnight, Gracie (1992), and These People (1981). His poetry has also been featured in the anthologies Best American Poetry (1991, 1994, 2019), The Best of the Best American Poetry (2013), and Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (2009). Schwartz is the editor of Prose: Elizabeth Bishop (2011) and coeditor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (1983) and of the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008). Schwartz also served as the classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix. Three-time winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor Awards, he has received a Professional Music Fraternity’s Radio and Television Award as well as support from the Amphion Foundation. Music In—and On—the Air (2013) offers a selection of his classical music criticism for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air. Schwartz’s poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize. Additional honors include a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Somerville Arts Council, an Associates of the Boston Public Library Literary Lights Award, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. Schwartz has served on the executive board of PEN New England and is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he has served as director of the creative writing program. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is the Poet Laureate of the City of Somerville.

Hourly Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow ......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between colonial-era slavery and freedom, Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy, and the Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation.

Express Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

250th Deep Dive Tour: Headquarters of a Revolution

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour exp......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour explores Cambridge Headquarters as a hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, and soldiers shaped history - and how later generations would shape its memory.

Hourly Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow ......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between colonial-era slavery and freedom, Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy, and the Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation.

Express Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

250th Deep Dive Tour: Headquarters of a Revolution

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour exp......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour explores Cambridge Headquarters as a hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, and soldiers shaped history - and how later generations would shape its memory.

Hourly Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow ......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between colonial-era slavery and freedom, Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy, and the Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation.

Express Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

250th Deep Dive Tour: Headquarters of a Revolution

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour exp......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour explores Cambridge Headquarters as a hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, and soldiers shaped history - and how later generations would shape its memory.

Hourly Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow ......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between colonial-era slavery and freedom, Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy, and the Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation.

Express Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

Family Fundays

Each Sunday during the summer, kids and their grownups can explore poetry, history, and self-expression on the lawn. Featuring drop-in crafts and lawn games! Free, no reservations required.

250th Deep Dive Tour: Headquarters of a Revolution

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour exp......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour explores Cambridge Headquarters as a hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, and soldiers shaped history - and how later generations would shape its memory.

Poetry Reading: Major Jackson

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music poetry and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.......More

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music poetry and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This reading is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Blue Flower Arts 2023) The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton & Company 2020) Roll Deep (W.W. Norton & Company 2015) Holding Company (W.W. Norton & Company 2010) Hoops (W.W. Norton & Company 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press 2002) which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. Jackson’s edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner) Renga for Obama (Harvard Review Monographs 2017) and the Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems (2013). He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli (University of Michigan Press 2022). A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Guggenheim Foundation National Endowment for the Arts and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University Major Jackson was awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award and received honors from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review The New Yorker Orion magazine the Paris Review Ploughshares Poetry magazine Poetry London and ZYZZYVA. Major Jackson lives in Nashville Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He hosts The Slowdown podcast a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media and is poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

Hourly Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow ......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between colonial-era slavery and freedom, Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy, and the Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation.

Express Tour

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

250th Deep Dive Tour: Headquarters of a Revolution

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour exp......More

Entrance to the historic house is by guided tour only, and all tours are free of charge.General George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour explores Cambridge Headquarters as a hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, and soldiers shaped history - and how later generations would shape its memory.