MAINE LIT FEST DAY 8

**This event is currently at capacity, but we have opened registration for a waitlist. If you would like to be added, please reserve a WAITLIST ticket. We will begin releasing tickets at 6:55 in the order of waitlist reservation – if you are not present when your reservation is released, we will move it to the end of the list. Please note that while we hope to accommodate everyone interested in joining us, a waitlist reservation does not guarantee admittance to this event!**

Reserve your free spot HERE!

For close to two decades, National Magazine Award winner Rebecca Traister (author of Good and Mad and a writer-at-large for New York Magazine) has covered women in politics, media, and entertainment. Recently, her work has centered female anger and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Kerri Arsenault, whose investigative memoir Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. Rebecca and Kerri will have a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to write nonfiction as a woman in this political, cultural, and environmental moment in which it feels like so many things are on fire (and some things literally are).

This event is co-sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, the Portland Public Library, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and Mechanics Hall. Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.

For more information on the Maine Lit Fist, click here!

About the Authors

Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine. A National Magazine Award winner, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies, both New York Times best-sellers, and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry.

Kerri Arsenault is co-founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University (TESS), contributing editor at Orion magazine, book critic, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Mill Town was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and top book pick for the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah magazine, People, Newsweek, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

For 2022–2023, Arsenault will be a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, where she will be working on two biography projects that orbit around her primary interest: the lives of ordinary people and their intersection with waste, pollutants, and toxicities.

Mechanics’ Hall Covid Policies

To ensure the safety of our staff, guests, and community, and under the direction of our Board, Mechanics’ Hall requires proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 (or an appropriately time-stamped negative COVID-19 test) for all persons attending our events until further notice. Masking is strongly recommended, and we reserve the right to require all persons to be masked based on current Covid-19 data. Please see our programming page for more details, or email us at info@mainemechanics.org