Making their first public appearance of the summer, our five artists in residence! Poets Matt Broaddus & Sylvia Jones, experimental playwright Justine Gelfman, fiction writer Lily Goldberg, and multimedia artist & writer Sofi Thanhauser will read brief selections from their work and join the audience afterwards for drinks and conversation.
$10 recommended donation
BYO Picnic on the lawn at Arrowhead for a resident showcase of the work they completed this summer.
Lanterns for evening strolls to the studios
Familiar Trees Pop-up
Drinks & oysters for all!
Our 4th annual family arts party at 44 Lincoln Street!
Featuring: Music by Johnny Irion & the Fireside Poets. Poetry Performance by Morningside students. Free brick oven pizza by SoMa. Science & Art Projects with Flying Cloud & Berkshire Art Center. Face painting by the amazing Barbara.
Plus! Six student artist books, created by Pittsfield Public School students & published by Citation Needed, available to the public for the very first time (with a special party discount)!
BYOB to Melville’s yard for the most beautiful evening of the year, as our writers-in-residence stand in Melville’s Barn and perform what they’ve been working on in the studios since July 1. Free and open to the public.
Grab a burger and a beer and hang out for a brief performance by our 2023 residents—then get a chance to talk to them about their work. Our residents this year work across genres: novels, poetry, historical fiction, nonfiction, singing, songwriting, playwriting, and acting.
The performance will be followed by a concert by Eliot Lewis of HALL AND OATES! Free and open to the public.
Our season kicks off at The Foundry with performances by multi-talented residents Danny Lavery, Elisa Gonzales, Auyon Mukharji, Kristina Gaddy, and Julia Mounsey, paired with wild and wonderful music. Click here for tickets.
Residents will perform fiction, poetry, theater, and songs in between short sets by Benjamin Jaffe, an international touring and recording artist whose songs have garnered over 10 million streams. A member of pop and country singer Kacey Musgraves band, Jaffe also recently released Enlightenment, a new record with Bill.E that sent him on a two month national tour.
The evening wraps up with a performance by Vandal Flag, the side project of South County native Asher Putnam whose band Bella’s Bartok has become a staple of the northeast festival and touring scene.
Children and families are invited to the FREE second annual Party in Kellogg Park! (44 Lincoln Street) on TUESDAY JUNE 13 from 4:00-6:00pm (right after school)!
Wood-fired pizza straight from SoMA’s pizza oven
Face-painting
Live music by Johnny Irion
Arts & Science activities by Berkshire Art Center and Flying Cloud
Short performances by Morningside Berkshire Theatre Group students and our Fireside students
Giant Letter Sculptures by Group-AU
RAIN DATE: Thursday June 13. Check back here for updates!
10 years ago, we wrote our first grant to start The Mastheads in Pittsfield. Join us for our first gala, and support our programming and studios for another 10!
On Saturday, August 6, we’ll be in Herman Melville’s barn, with:
folk music from 6-7pm by Johnny Irion,
performance by Mastheads residents from 7-8pm,
dance party with DJ Senecca from 8-11pm,
lantern-lit explorations of the Mastheads studios,
pop-up bookstore by Familiar Trees,
and food from Berkshire farms.
Tribal Historic Preservation Manager Bonney Hartley opens the Mission House for a discussion of the Many Trails of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans and current engagements in her community’s homelands.
Join us at Familiar Trees in Great Barrington! You’ll hear work from our four writers-in-residence, enjoy cocktails from Moon Cloud, and check out a Mastheads-curated selection of favorite books.
Our five writers-in-residence read from new work! Playwright Sam Mayer and poets Helene Achanzar, Christine Larusso, Amanda Smeltz and Keith S. Wilson are writing in the studios at Arrowhead for the first two weeks of July. Come hear them read, followed by drinks & mingling.
In this public roundtable, scholars and Mastheads team members will discuss the art and literature of the Berkshires during the modernist period (1914-1945) and how modernist style continues to impact the region today.
We will hear Horace Ballard (Williams College/Williams College Museum of Art) on modernist visual art, Tessa Kelly (Mastheads/Arcade Works Architecture) on modernist architecture, and Jeffrey Lawrence (Mastheads/Rutgers University) on modernist literature. Alex Sayf Cummings (Georgia State University) will conclude with thoughts on the broader legacy of modernist style in the United States and how deindustrialization has changed the look and feel of the contemporary American city. The roundtable will be followed by a Q&A period and community discussion.
Join poets Sarah Trudgeon & Don’Jea Smith on Zoom for a low-key poetry writing session. We’ll focus on themes of food, growth, neighborhood, and community!
Participants will have a chance to publish their work in an anthology produced by The Mastheads, and select poems will be featured in a short film about the Westside created by Tessa Kelly this summer! You can also read your poem at block parties at the Westside Riverway Park this summer.
So far this spring we’ve written poems with Westsiders, teens at Roots Rising, and elementary students at Morningside Community School. We can’t wait for you to join us!
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! Grab one more round and celebrate this strange summer with us! Our five writers-in-residence will give a reading of the BRAND NEW WORK they produced this July!
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! We’re thrilled to partner with the Westside Legends on another exciting event. Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed is a professor of history and former Director of Women Studies at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts, and she has taught and researched local history for over twenty-five years. Her talks are endlessly engaging, informative, and inspiring, and we can’t wait to listen. Q&A to follow! (This event will also be broadcast live on Facebook.)
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! Whether you write for a living or the last time you read a poem was in high school, this workshop is for you! Have fun exercising those creative writing muscles in an upbeat, friendly, intellectually-stimulating environment. Best part: at the end of the hour, we promise you’ll have written a totally competent poem (or two). For our second workshop, poet & teacher extraordinaire Chris Schlegel and Mastheads resident Sasha Debevec-McKenney will teach us how to use randomization and chance to spark creativity, including examples, prompts, and plenty of time to write (and share! Do it!).
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! Whether you write for a living or the last time you read a poem was in high school, this workshop is for you! Have fun exercising those creative writing muscles in an upbeat, friendly, intellectually-stimulating environment. Best part: at the end of the hour, we promise you’ll have written a totally competent poem (or two). For our first workshop, poet & teacher extraordinaire Chris Schlegel will lead us on a haibun adventure, including a discussion of the form, examples, and plenty of time to write (and share!! Do it!!).
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! Grab a drink and turn on Zoom: It’s our 2020 Kickoff Party! Meet our 5 Writers-in-Virtual-Residence and learn about their writing. Kendra Allen, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Jessica Laser, Helen Betya Rubinstein, and My Tran will each give a 6-minute reading of their work, including fiction, poetry, and memoir.
After our Kickoff Reading on Wednesday, July 1, we’ll host a literary Zoom event every Sunday in July. Be sure to register! Links are in the event descriptions below. Keep an eye out, too, for our Newspaper Folds in the Berkshire Eagle, our six Text Collage Billboards, and resident writing installed in essential Pittsfield businesses including Guido’s, Harry’s, Pittsfield Health Food, Carr Hardware, and Elm Street Hardware!
For the third year in a row (!), in celebration of Pittsfield's literary past, present, and future, The Mastheads has asked 10 exciting local writers to read one short piece of their writing alongside a piece by a historic Berkshire author. Admission is free for this time-traveling literary revel, and food, drinks, books, and Mastheads swag will be available for purchase.
The very best poets are kids. At 10:00AM TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17 and 4:15PM WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, Conte and Morningside elementary students will perform their original poetry—not to be missed! In addition, students’ own photography and poetry broadsides will be on display through January 17. Refreshments will be provided on event dates!
Come celebrate the summer with us! Our five writers-in-residence will give a reading of the work they produced in The Mastheads studios this July.
Grab a copy of Summer (available at Mastheads events & the Berkshire Athenaeum) and join our team scholar and professor Jeffrey Lawrence for a discussion of this Berkshire novella in which the young Charity Royall, born in the hills and adopted by an older man in town, falls in love with the New York-based Lucius Harney, an architect who has come for the summer to study the region’s houses (some things never change…). Jazz night follows, free for all Mastheads attendees!
This July The Mastheads is taking on The Gilded Age, concentrating our programming on five cultural figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: writers Edith Wharton, Henry James, and W.E.B. Du Bois; photographer James Van Der Zee; and Mark Twain, who gave the era its title.
On Sunday, as part of the Westside Summerfest series hosted by the Westside Legends, Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed will lead a discussion of writer and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois and photographer James Van Der Zee in the Berkshires. Afterwards we'll party (of course!) with food and live music.
Come meet our 2019 writers-in-residence! Listen to the writers read from their work, learn what’s in store for our summer lecture series, and grab a copy of The Mastheads Reader: Volume 3!
All events are free and open to the public. Refreshments provided.
Once again, for the annual 10x10 Upstreet Arts Festival, and in celebration of Pittsfield's literary history, The Mastheads has asked 10 local writers across disciplines (poets, novelists, pastors, journalists…) to each read one short piece by a historic Berkshire author alongside one short piece of their own. Admission is free. Food, drinks, books, and Mastheads swag will be available for purchase.
For our last event of the summer, our five writers-in-residence will give a reading of the work they produced in The Mastheads studios this July. It promises to be a grand evening!
At our final Tuesday on the Terrace, award-winning poet and professor Jaswinder Bolina will give a poetry reading and a discussion of his work as the founder of Write the Power, an online social justice community.
For our third Tuesday on the Terrace at the Berkshire Athenaeum, author, scholar, and poet Dolores Hayden will join us for a talk on urbanism and design.
In partnership with the Berkshire County NAACP, and in celebration of the 150th birthday of Berkshire County native W. E. B. Du Bois, Professor Neil Roberts of Williams College will deliver his talk "W.E.B. Du Bois and Political Thought in the Shadow of Frederick Douglass."
On each of the first four Tuesdays in July, The Mastheads will host a literary lecture on the lovely outdoor terrace of the Berkshire Athenaeum. For our first lecture, Professor Meredith McGill of Rutgers University will discuss the work of Berkshire writers and activists Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble.
Join us for a literary celebration! Our five new writers-in-residence will read from their work, then Jeffrey Lawrence of Rutgers University will lead a discussion of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener", then we'll party!
