April is National Poetry Month, an annual celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. The mission of NPM is to highlight the legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets, to introduce more people to the pleasures of reading poetry, and to bring poets and poetry to the public in innovative ways.

 The Concord Bookshop is kicking off this month-long celebration with an "open mic" poetry circle led by Jim Leahy on Sunday, March 27 at 3:00pm.

 Jim Leahy is a familiar face as the manager of Debra's Natural Gourmet since 2000. He has written for the Concord Journal for 15 years, and, in 2007 published Living in Concord: essays, memoirs, reflections, a poem and a recipe. Jim has led a monthly poetry reading group at Debra's for two and a half years, and hosts the weekly Poetry Moment, on Concord Cable Television.  He is a lover of all kinds of poetry and has written many humorous presentation poems and an (as yet) unpublished book of children's verse

Stop by to share your favorite poem, or read an original composition! Each person in attendance will be entered to win a copy of The Poets Laureate Anthology, edited and with introductions by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt; Foreword by Billy Collins.  This is a beautiful new Norton hardcover with selections from all 43 of the US Poets Laureate, accompanied by a short profile of each. People who choose to read or share a poem will get two entries in the raffle.

We are thrilled to host Daphne Kalotay with Russian Winter.  You may recall that we offered signed editions of the hardcover last year.

We understand that many book groups have a "wait for the paperback" guideline.  If that's the case with your group - wait no longer! Meet the author here and pick up a paperback edition; if you're unable to attend the event, you're welcome to pre-order a personally-inscribed copy.

Set in both modern-day Boston and post-WWII Moscow, Russian Winter tells the story of Bolshoi ballerina Nina Revskaya as she becomes a member of Stalin's cultural elite before escaping to the West following a terrible betrayal. Decades later, she has decided to auction off her famed jewelry collection-including the rare set of amber that a Boston professor, Grigori Solodin, translator of the works of Revskaya's late poet-husband, believes may hold the key to a long-kept secret. The literary mystery Grigori sets out to solve-with the help of Drew Brooks, a young associate at the Boston auction house-reaches much deeper: to the cost of making art and trying to live and love under circumstances of enormous repression.

Declared "a magnificent tale of love, loss, betrayal and redemption" (Washington Post), "briskly paced, fresh, and engaging" (Booklist) and "suspenseful, thoughtful, and engrossing" (New York Journal of Books), Russian Winter was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel competition and received a starred review from Kirkus.

Author Daphne Kalotay is also the author of Calamity and Other Stories, which was short-listed for the 2005 Story Prize. A former fellow of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, she lives in the Boston area.

Join us Thursday, March 31 at 7pm to discuss this edge-of-your seat novel by Masha Hamilton, a journalist and novelist.

"Hamilton has used both her considerable empathy as a writer and her experience in the Middle East to create an intimate portrait of 21-year-old Jonas Meitzner. It's not easy to like him for what he intends to do, much less admire him, but Hamilton makes us aware of his humanity...Sensitive, lonely and full of the anger and doubt many young people feel, Jonas seems in Hamilton's hands not a stranger, not an impenetrable figure of dread whose behavior is beyond our understanding, but the ordinary, fragile child of ordinary, fragile people. You don't exactly want to look at the story of what happens to Jonas, but Hamilton has made it very hard to tear your gaze away." -- The Washington Post

"Gorgeous and complex....a very tense narrative, vividly imagined and eerily plausible." -- Publishers Weekly 

As part of a series organized by the Concord Historical Collaborative, John Stauffer of Harvard University presents a lecture on "New England Transcendentalism and the Election of Abraham Lincoln."

John Stauffer is a leading authority on antislavery, social protest movements and interracial friendship. He is a Harvard University professor of English and American Literature and African American Studies, and Chair of the History of American Civilization program at Harvard. 

His eight books include The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002) and Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008), which both won numerous awards. He is the author of more than 50 articles, on topics ranging from the Civil War era to visual culture, and is working on new books about interracial friendship and about Frederick Douglass and visual culture. 

The lecture will be held 3:00-4:00pm on Sunday, April 17; French Hall, Concord Museum.  Free and open to the public.  For more information, call 978-369-9763.