Amherst Lit Walk

The Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Amherst Business Improvement District are partnering with downtown businesses and organizations to provide a day of author readings, poetry, local history, giveaways, and more, in celebration of Amherst's rich literary community.

Pick up a map at participating locations. All events are free to attend (though donations/purchases are welcome). Collect at least 4 stickers at events throughout the day, and hand in your completed map to any MCB staff to be entered into a raffle to win some bookish goodies!

Full schedule available online at Amherst Lit Walk. See you there!

Info: Explore Amherst’s historic West Cemetery through the lens of Emily Dickinson’s condolence letters with guide Sarah Zureick-Brown, a trustee of the Amherst Historical Society and the creator of The Silent Sod Substack. During this 75 minute tour, you’ll meet Dickinson’s local contemporaries to whom she expressed grief and solace in her letters, and you’ll also be introduced to some of Amherst’s other literary legends.

Location: Meet at 45 Boltwood Walk (Amherst History Center)

Note: The distance covered will be roughly one mile with some uneven terrain. There is no seating available at the cemetery.

Info: Join local bestselling author Angela DiTerlizzi in a special storytime with her latest book The Marvelous Now. This calming companion to the bestselling The Magical Yet and The Curious Why is a marvelous introduction for young readers to mindfulness and keeping your cool. Following the storytime there will be a family yoga session to practice some of these mindfulness concepts with local family yoga instructor Angelica Lopez. A book signing will follow, and Amherst Books will be on site with copies available for purchase.

Angela DiTerlizzi is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who delights in writing rhythmic, charming picture books to be enjoyed and shared by both parents and children alike. Angelica Lopez is a 500-hour trauma-informed yoga instructor who discovered both yoga and books as sources of comfort, imagination, and grounding in childhood.

Info: Browse and purchase books and literary magazines from some of Western Massachusetts’s leading presses and publications, including Amherst College Press, Orion Magazine, Restless Books, Storey Publishing, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, UMass Press, and White Goat Press. Discover new titles, pick up recent issues, and support the region’s vibrant literary scene all in one place.

Mass Center for the Book will also be tabling to share information about our statewide literary programs, including the Mass Book Awards, Letters About Literature, the Reading Challenge, and more. Stop by the MCB table to receive your Lit Walk sticker for attending the fair. Event will be in the Social Hall of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst.

Info: In this creative writing workshop, we will focus on motion. When we consider a single motion that we do in our everyday life, a simple act like nodding or skipping, how do we describe it? When we use language to capture it, that language opens up a world of comparisons. What else would we use this word to describe? Where else do we see this motion? What do we learn about ourselves when we consider that leaves nod in the wind or that a record can skip? The workshop will begin by reading and analyzing a poem as a group. We will closely examine how the poet creates different images around a single motion, what these images reveal about one another, and how they affect the reader. After this, we’ll write our own poems, paying similar attention to the various ways a motion can be expressed. No prior experience reading or writing poetry is required!

Info: Margot Livesey will read from her Massachusetts Book Award-honored novel The Road from Belhaven. She will share reflections on the book’s origins and craft, followed by a brief discussion and audience Q&A. A book signing will follow, and Amherst Books will be on site with copies available for purchase.

The Road from Belhaven is a richly imagined historical novel inspired by Livesey’s mother and her “gift of second sight.” Set in late nineteenth-century Scotland, the book illuminates the social constraints faced by women while paying homage to the classic novels that shaped Livesey’s literary imagination. MARGOT LIVESEY is the author of nine novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field, as well as The Road from Belhaven, which received Fiction Honors in the Mass Book Awards.

Info: Presented by the Emily Dickinson Museum, this writing workshop with Jan Freeman explores poems by Dickinson and objects from the collection of the Amherst Historical Society that will help participants express emotions, memories, and observations about home. Participants will engage in exercises that open their perceptions and strengthen their use of personal details as metaphor. Experienced and inexperienced poets will open their imaginations and express their unique truths. Prompts will be provided. Recommended for writers age 17+.

About the facilitator: Jan Freeman is the recipient of a 2026 Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Blue Structure (Calypso Editions) and a chapbook. Her poems are forthcoming or recently appeared in Patterson Review, Ploughshares, Plume, POETRY, Salamander, Tar River Review, and many other journals and anthologies.

Info: Hosted at Masuda's Cafe, Live Lit is is the premier literary performance event run entirely be graduate students of the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers. This event will host 6 writers housed in the MFA, three poets and three fiction writers, as they read form a combination of new work and previously published pieces. Join the MFA this Saturday as we present the new bleeding edge of contemporary literature!

Info: Come to Protocol and bring your friends! Get ready to go head to head with other readers with literary trivia! Teams of up to 6 are encouraged to work together. Literary trivia will consist of entertaining, often obscure, facts regarding books, authors, characters, and publishing history, designed to test and expand knowledge from classics to contemporary literature. Winning teams will receive prizes!

Info: Jordy Rosenberg will read from his new novel Night Night Fawn. He will speak briefly about the writing of the book, followed by audience Q&A. A signing will follow, and copies will be available for purchase.

JORDY ROSENBERG is the author of the novels Confessions of the Fox (2018) and Night Night Fawn (2026) both from Random House/One World, as well as a scholarly monograph about 18th-century religious enthusiasts. Jordy is a professor in the Department of English and Associated MFA Faculty in the Program for Poets and Writers at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Info: Presented in partnership with the Amherst Business Improvement District, Writers Reading is a curated series featuring local authors. Join us for a line-up curated by Anna Maria Hong. Fellow authors Eula Biss, James Hannaham, and John Hennessy will join Hong in sharing selections from their work.

Books will be available for purchase. See author bios at umass.edu/downtown/news-events.

Info: Wrap up the day with the Lit Walk Raffle! Anyone who attends four or more Lit Walk events and collects the corresponding stickers in their passport can turn it in to a Mass Center for the Book staff member at any time during the day to be entered to win prizes from local organizations and businesses, including the Boltwood Inn, Amherst Cinema, Emily Dickinson Museum, Restless Books, the Eric Carle Museum, and more.

The raffle drawing will take place live at the final event of the day. You do not need to be present to win—prize winners will be contacted to arrange pickup at the Mass Center for the Book office in Northampton—but we hope you’ll join us to celebrate the end of a wonderful day of literary events.

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Amherst, United States

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