Mass Book Awards Longlist Reading

Event Description

Join GrubStreet and Massachusetts Center for the Book for a reading celebrating the longlist honorees of the 2026 Mass Book Awards! Longlisted authors in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Carroll Beauvais, Benjamin Bellet, Imani Perry, Maria Pinto, Milo Todd, and Sam Wachman, will read from their honored titles. Books will be available for purchase from Porter Square Books.

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is requested.

About the Authors

Born and raised in Alabama, Carroll Beauvais holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is a Lecturer in Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. Her work has received support from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and has appeared in places like Prairie Schooner and Mid-American Review. Preverbal in her first book.

Benjamin Bellet is a clinical psychologist and military veteran. After leaving active duty in the US Army, he earned his PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard University. He now teaches psychotherapy for serious mental illness at Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and provides treatment in a private practice. He is the author of the poetry collection Cadet (Staircase Books, 2025), and his poems have also been published in the Colorado Review, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, MAYDAY Magazine and elsewhere.

Imani Perry is the National Book Award–winning author of South to America, Black In Blues, as well as six other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

Maria Pinto is a naturalist, essayist, fictioneer, and educator living in the Boston area. She teaches creative writing for various organizations, has led workshops and given lectures for mycological societies and environmental groups around the country, and leads regular fungal forays at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Her book of lyric essays, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and is the recipient of St. Botolph Foundation’s Don Kissel Prize for Nonfiction.

Milo Todd is a Massachusetts Cultural Council grantee and a Lambda Literary Fellow. His work has appeared in Slice Magazine and elsewhere. He is co–editor in chief of Foglifter and teaches creative writing to queer and trans adults.

Sam Wachman is a writer from Cambridge, Massachusetts with Ukrainian roots. His short fiction has appeared in Sonora Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and New England Review. Before writing The Sunflower Boys, he taught English to primary schoolers in central Ukraine and worked with refugee families in Europe and the United States. 

About the Mass Book Awards

The Massachusetts Book Awards recognize significant works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, graphic novel, and children’s/young adult literature written, illustrated, or translated by current Commonwealth residents. An annual “notable contribution to publishing” award recognizes the work of Massachusetts-based presses. Submissions for the next cycle will open in September for books published in the 2026 calendar year. Learn more at massbook.org.