Nina MacLaughlin

Cambridge

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Author of WAKE, SIREN @fsgbooks; SUMMER SOLSTICE and WINTER SOLSTICE @blacksparrowprs; HAMMER HEAD @wwnorton. New England Literary News columnist @bostonglobe.

Articles

The Hearts’ Desire: Mainers Climb High in Historic First Cupset

2 weeks ago | ussoccer.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Winter weather warnings flashed on signs along the highway. Hartford Athletic’s players and coaches must’ve seen them on their drive north to Maine for their game against the Portland Hearts of Pine in the Second Round of the Open Cup. A raw grey weeknight at the start of April at the Lewiston High School football field, and winter lived in the wind. Blankets on the bleachers, the smell of snow and grilled sausage in the air. It made a person hungry.
Hearts Open in Maine: Love & Pride for Portland’s New Team

3 weeks ago | ussoccer.com | Nina MacLaughlin

The Hearts’ marketing is slick. It’s hitting all the notes. Earthy tones and talk of culture and community, talk of strength, unity, and hope, getting right the cadence of the captions on the photographs on Instagram. In these moments, one can’t ignore the commerce of it all, the dollars and the deals, the machinery of the till.And there’s the marketing team taking happy photos to splash across the socials.
Celebrating ‘Free to Be,’ a new little magazine, and a memoir about Braille and blindness - The Boston Globe

Dec 7, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Artwork by Barbara Bascove from “Free to Be … You and Me”Barbara Bascove, illustration for “Free to Be… You and Me” by Marlow Thomas & Friends (Running Press). Collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum, 1974Half a century of being ‘Free’In the early 1970s, actress, author, activist Marlo Thomas was looking for books to give her young niece and was dismayed by the misogyny and sexual inequality she found in children’s books. So she decided to write her own.
A fresh edition of Knott’s poems, Comics Expo, new bookstores

Nov 27, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Black Ocean press re-issues ‘The Naomi Poems’Bill Knott published his first book, “The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans,” in 1968 under the pen name St. Geraud. An orphan, he lived a peripatetic life, spending some time in a mental institution, working on a farm, serving in the army, working as an orderly in a hospital, publishing 13 books of poetry, and teaching at Emerson College. He died in 2014.
A ‘locally inspired’ bookstore is born, another celebrates a milestone - The Boston Globe

Nov 22, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

A new bookstore for Fields CornerWhat’s the role of the bookstore in a community’s landscape? A city’s? A country’s? How can a bookstore work to reframe the stories we tell and the stories we’re told? Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola and Bing Broderick, former director of Haley House, envisioned a bookstore that would be a gathering space, a cultural hub, that would offer ample shelf space to books that challenge political paradigms.
Poems of desire, looking at graffiti, a new bookstore in Quincy

Nov 15, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

New poetry collection from Carolyn OliverIn her new collection of poetry “The Alcestis Machine” (Acre), Carolyn Oliver tracks paths between the here we know and the gaping strange elsewhere — not just other places but other times, other galaxies, other realities. There’s a sepulchral mood to these wry and fertile poems, and Oliver bends the real, as when the angel of death comes into the flower shop for bluebells and leaves with hollyhocks. There’s a repeated imagining of another life.
Essays of fire and light, celebrating antiquarian books, and All She Wrote Books - The Boston Globe

Oct 30, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Essays by Chloe Garcia RobertsThe experience of reading Chloe Garcia Roberts’s collection of essays, “Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology” (co∙im∙press), is having new light — sometimes a focused beam, sometimes a splashing sunburst — brought to closets and dark hallways and forest paths. Hers is a penetrating light, wise and wild both, a rare combination and on heated display here.
Poems of shelter, unexpected verse, and the Word festival

Oct 17, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Abbie Kiefer's debut collection has a distinctly New England disposition.courtesy of abbie kieferA spare poetry of New EnglandThe specific seething spareness of the New England said/unsaid lives in Abbie Kiefer’s debut collection of poetry, “Certain Shelter” (June Road). Death hovers, “bodies stop being,” as real and as present as the dried beans and bonemeal, as “farm grit,” and crates of chickens.
New essays by Birkerts, Concord’s Festival of Authors, and Zines

Oct 8, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Sven Birkerts's new essay collection explores the mysteries of writing.Arrowsmith PressEssays on life, reading, and writingSven Birkerts, co-editor of AGNI, former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, author of 11 books, has a new collection of essays, “The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing” (Arrowsmith) that reflects on a life reading, a life writing, and the way that life changes as the decades accumulate.
A poet explores animal energies, Bow & Arrow Press lands in a new home, and local award news - The Boston Globe

Oct 3, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Nina MacLaughlin

Nine Syllables Press, based in Northampton, works in partnership with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College to publish poetry chapbooks, focusing on work from voices that have been systematically kept out of the conversation, including women, BIPOC poets, and trans/LGBTQIA++ poets. They take their name from a line by Sylvia Plath — “I’m a riddle in nine syllables” — and this week marks the publication of the winner of the first 9SP chapbook contest.