Jessica A. Kent
Mapping Boston’s Literary History: From Colonial Printing Presses to Confessional Poets
Boston has an incredibly rich literary history, yet many people walk past sites every day where authors of the past lived, wrote, gathered, and published without realizing the literary history right in front of them. Did you know that Louisa May Alcott published her first novel while living on Pinckney Street in Beacon Hill? The first printing press in the Colonies was located in Harvard Square? Jewish Book Month was founded by an immigrant librarian at the West End library? A home on Charles St. hosted literary greats of 19th-century literature? And the center of American publishing was once located in what today is a Chipotle? In this session, Kent will walk attendees through the highlights of Boston’s literary past, from Colonial printing presses to 20th-century poets. As we go, we’ll place each location on a map of Boston and Cambridge, building a visual of how individuals shaped American literary culture and showing that literary history is all around us today.
Jessica A. Kent, MA, (LiteraryBoston.com) is the founder and director of Literary Boston, a cultural initiative that promotes the Boston literary community, past and present, through website resources, social media, a weekly newsletter, literature classes, literary salons, and literary history walking tours. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and a Master’s in Literature from Harvard University, where her thesis on Moby-Dick and Calvinism won the Director’s Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in the North American Review, the Emerson Review, and elsewhere, and received the Leah Lovenheim Award for Short Fiction. She recently completed GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program and is currently working on a novel about paramedics in 1970s Boston. Other past literary roles include library assistant, bookseller, literary magazine founder, literary marketing consultant, and interim director of the Boston Book Festival.
