News

Six Cape Cod Writers to Read at the Opening of the Provincetown Book Festival Saturday, September 21, 9:30 a.m.

The Provincetown Book Festival will kick off at 9:30 a.m., Saturday, September 21, with a curated reading by local authors, chosen by writer and editor Russ Lopez.  The selected writers are A. D. Metcalfe, Steven Myerson, Rani Neutill, Kai Potter, and Virginia Reiser. The sixth reader will be Marcene Marcoux, who was selected in 2022 but was unable to attend.

 For this event, dubbed “Reading Local,” Russ Lopez reviewed more than two dozen submissions from local and regional writers in all genres. Mr. Lopez commented, “This was hard! There were [many] others who would be interesting reads, but there just isn't space.”

 A.D. Metcalfe is a member of Grub Street and sits on the Board of Directors for the Cape Cod Writers Center. She is also a host and co-producer for Books and the World, a literary cable TV and YouTube program. Her award-winning debut novel, Street, (the first in a series) was released in December of 2023. Several of her short pieces have been published in various on-line and print magazines, and her children's book, Mousebound, was published under the pen name, Leslie Ann George. She was born and raised in New York City, where her experiences continue to inspire much of her writing. For several decades, she made Provincetown her home.

 Steven Bruce Myerson is a poet, playwright, director, and performer whose work has been presented at theaters and festivals all over the Northeast, as well as on Cape Cod. On the Cape, his plays have been presented at the Barnstable Comedy Club’s Playwright Festival, for a series of monologues at WHAT, and at Provincetown Theater for the 24 Hour Plays. His lyrical play, “TO THE EXTREME!,” received a Winter Read at Provincetown Theater. As a poet, he has read at many venues on Cape Cod and at the Fine Arts Work Center where he was twice named a Summer Scholar. He is honored to have been previously chosen to read his poetry for “Reading Local.” As an actor, he premiered his solo show, “LOST LOVE POEMS,” at the Providence Fringe Festival/Wilbury Theater Group, and can be spotted in “The Gilded Age” on HBO Max.

 Rani Neutill’s memoir, Do You Know How Lucky You Are, explores life with her mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother, narrating the desperate drive to care for her, despite a history of violence and neglect, and to save her from a false prophet bent on taking advantage of her. She is a recipient of a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. She has taught ethnic American, Asian American, and postcolonial literature at Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins University. Currently, she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature at Tufts University and Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, ELLE.com, Al Jazeera English, CNN, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She is the co-editor of the book Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader about the K-pop group BTS, forthcoming from Duke University Press.

 Kai Potter is a writer for the Provincetown Independent and newly published author. His first  book is Noticing. The Quiet Season on Outer Cape Cod, a collection of nature essays written over the last three years. It focuses on the lesser known and very rich quiet months of the Outer Cape. Kai is an artist, writer, surfer, and landscape designer born and raised on the outer edge of Cape Cod. He grew up amongst the scrub pines, sand dunes, wild oceans, and colorful characters that shape the landscape there. He is often found wading through roadside meadows or lying flat, cheek pressed to the ground, in pursuit of a closer look.

 Virginia “Ginny” Reiser was a Senior Editor of G.K. Hall’s Large Print division in Boston after graduating from Indiana University with a degree in literature. After studying Italian cooking in Tuscany, Ginny ran Pranzo Café in Brewster as well as a successful catering business. She finally returned to her first love, which was writing. She took classes at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and later earned her MFA in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Ginny died in 2016. Her work will be read by her husband, Gary Urgonski, and his second wife, Carolyn Duch.

 Marcene Marcoux is a cultural anthropologist with a Master’s and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She has been a Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University and Boston University. She is the author of Cursillo: Anatomy of a Movement. She has written extensively for China Business Weekly, publishing more than forty articles for China’s largest English business weekly, focused on leadership and strategic thinking. She also served for fourteen years on Provincetown’s Historic District Commission, dedicated to the town’s historic preservation. Marcene was chosen for “Reading Local” at the 2022 Provincetown Book Festival, but was unable to read.