Community Calendar

Skidmore Encore announces registration for its Fall 2026 lecture series delivered by the remarkable Skidmore College faculty for adult learners age 55+ from around the local region. Encore attracts intellectually curious people who are eager to learn. Join us! The 2026 program runs for seven weeks on Tuesdays from September 29 through November 10 in the gorgeous Arthur Zankel Music Center Skidmore College campus. Online registration opens Tuesday, September 1, 2026 at 9:00 AM.
For more information: www.skidmore.edu/encore

Data Consciousness and Luminous Abstraction
This lecture brings W.E.B. Du Bois's pioneering data visualizations into dialogue with Alma Thomas's luminous abstractions, tracing a shared commitment to visualizing Black life beyond statistical reduction or representational constraint. Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is an award-winning scholar, curator, and critic whose work reshapes how we understand race, gender, and representation. Reception to follow.

In conjunction with Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand, join us for a conversation with painter Suzan Frecon, poet and translator Marcella Durand, and poet and founder/editor of Insurance Editions (publisher of The Light Factory) Kostas Anagnopoulos as they discuss their collaboration. The conversation will be moderated by poet, novelist, translator, and the University at Albany English Department’s Poet-in-Residence Anna Moschovakis.

Suzan Frecon is known for abstract oil paintings and works on paper that—as she describes her practice—“speak for themselves.” Made over long stretches of time, her work invites the viewer’s sustained attention: these, she says, “are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience.”

Marcella Durand’s most recent book is The Temple of Happiness, published by Black Square Editions in summer 2026. Her previous book, A Winter Triangle, received the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize (Fordham University Press, 2025). She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (MIT Press, 2024).

Kostas Anagnopoulos continues the long-standing tradition of poets publishing poets through his small press, Insurance Editions, and is the author of Moving Blanket (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and Night Painting (Cuneiform, 2026).

Anna Moschovakis is a writer, translator, and performer. Her most recent book is An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unhinged novel about shadow selves, cults, and method acting. She lives in the Catskill Mountains and at the edge of the Mojave Desert.

Free parking will be available during the event in the State Quad student parking lot.

The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum presents A Reading Frederick Douglass Together Book Club, with sessions facilitated by Dr. Ousmane K. Power-Greene on October 10th and Dr. Nick Bromell on November 7th at 12:15pm. Book club materials will be available for pick up at the event and online, and sessions will be held at the Hadley Public Library in the Community Room at 50 Middle St, Hadley, MA 01035. Register at the ticketing link for the free book club, and find out more about this and other programming at www.pphmuseum.org/events. Reading Frederick Douglass Together events are funded in part by Mass Humanities.

Savage Wonder Art Center presents THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka, adapted from the German and directed by Christopher Paul Meyer, four Saturdays in September. Five actors play twenty-five parts. Doors at 6 p.m. for dinner, cocktails and live music; performance at 7 p.m. Fifty dollars, all-inclusive. September 5, 12, 19 and 26 at 141 Main Street, Beacon

The Red Dragon Reading Series at SUNY Oneonta will present poet Heather Bartlett, who will read from her current work. She is the author of the poetry collection, Another Word for Hunger (Sundress Publications). Her poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO Poetry, and others. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Cortland.

Embark on a tranquil midweek journey through LongHouse Reserve's 16-acre sculpture garden and nature sanctuary. In these weekly walks, expert docent Irwin Levy leads an intimate, hour-plus long tour that delves into the harmonious blend of art, design, and nature created and curated by founder Jack Lenor Larsen.

Join the NYS Writers Institute for a conversation with William Alexander, Cuban-American science fiction and fantasy author and winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for his first novel, Goblin Secrets (2012).

In praise, the late Ursula K. Le Guin said, "I wish I could have read it when I was eleven.”

Alexander’s debut science fiction novel for adults, Sunward, was a finalist for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award, and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

The new novel follows the story of a human space traveler charged with mentoring “baby bots,” juvenile AI who are developmentally in their teens, training them how to interact within society, and essentially becoming their foster mom.

Come to the Berkshire Museum for an evening of reading as we once again transform its galleries into mini reading centers! This event features library leaders, community members, and educators as guest readers. The event will host spaces for families to read together and will include free books for all children in attendance to take home. Different galleries of the museum will feature readers and their books that relate to something in the museum or the community around us, and there will be a craft space for making your own take–home bookmark!

Thank you to Lee Bank for their generous sponsorship of this program!

The Berkshire Nature Talk Series continues with a look at the insects most of us take for granted until they're gone. Kyle Bradford of the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program (FEP) joins the series to talk about bees and how they hold ecosystems and our food systems together, and what puts that work at risk.

Bradford has spent more than a decade in the field, from ant surveys in Columbia County to insect pest detection in California vineyards to graduate research on ants in the pine barrens of western Massachusetts. That range is reflected in how he talks about bees, not as an isolated topic but as one thread in a much larger web of human-managed land, landscape history, and the conservation choices we’re making right now. Expect a talk grounded in fieldwork and, given Bradford’s side career as a nature photographer, expect it to look as good as it sounds.

Bradford holds an MS in Conservation Biology from Antioch University New England and a BS in Environmental Science from the University of Vermont. He first found his footing in insect ecology as an FEP intern in 2012, and his interests have ranged across biogeography, rare species conservation, and the question of how landscape history should shape the conservation work being done today.

This event is free for West Stockbridge Historical Society members and open to the public with a suggested $10 donation for non-members. Seating is limited to 80 attendees. Cash only at door. To reserve your spot, go to weststockbridgehistory.org