As we wrap up 2024, we asked our colleagues at Mass Humanities to share the experiences that moved them this year, including films, books, concerts, journeys, and their work with humanities organizations across Massachusetts. We hope you enjoy the list and wish you a Happy New Year.
Marie Pellissier, Program Officer
- Favorite performance or live show: The Lone Bellow at Groton Music Center. The Lone Bellow is one of my favorite indie/Americana bands, and seeing them at Groton Music Center this fall was amazing! The building is only two years old, and being in the venue feels like being inside a giant violin. The acoustics are perfect, and hearing The Lone Bellow’s harmonies and some mad mandolin playing in that space was amazing. It also inspired me to consider learning a new instrument!
- Favorite book: Buried Deep by Naomi Novik. This collection of short stories from one of my favorite fantasy authors has stories that explore her existing worlds, a preview of her next series, and stories built from ancient Greek mythology. My favorite was a re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice…where Elizabeth Bennet rode a dragon.
- Favorite TV show or film: The Great British Bake Off. The challenges get harder every year, and Alison and Noel are phenomenal hosts. And Prue Leith is a style icon. Need I say more?
- General highlight: Moving to Lowell and getting to know the city’s culture scene. Lowell is incredibly diverse, and the cultural events, restaurant scene, and non-profit landscape (including multiple Mass Humanities grantees!) reflects the city’s diversity and empowers its residents.
- Favorite MH event: Visiting the Framingham History Center to see “Framingham’s Collective Journeys,” an exhibit curated by Anna Tucker and Patrick St. Pierre. Anna showed me around and highlighted all the creative ways they invited the community into the exhibit, not just as viewers but as contributors and co-curators. The biggest highlight for me was the interactive section of the exhibit on food and memory, and how food can connect us to our families, our past, and our community.
Diane Feltner, Development Manager
- Favorite performance or live show: Wicked at The Bushnell in Hartford, CT.
- Favorite book: I’m a huge Nora Roberts fan and have read several of her books this past year.
- Favorite TV show or film: Netflix documentary on the Menendez Brothers.
- General highlight: The trip I took to Ireland with a group from Mass Humanities. This experience was life changing and something I will cherish always. The country, the people, the activities, the Douglass readings, the joy, the love, all of it will never be forgotten. I experienced so many wonderful adventures in Ireland and met the most incredible people, many of whom I now call friends! Thank you, Mass Humanities, for broadening my horizons and opening my eyes to the wonder of Frederick Douglass.
- Favorite MH event: While I found all of the events this past year to be most enjoyable and rewarding, I think my favorite one was the Frederick Douglass reading in Springfield. Toni McComb (a Mass Humanities board member) did a fantastic job of organizing the event. All of the readers were so inspiring, especially the children. The entertainment was wonderful!
Brian Boyles, Executive Director
- Favorite book: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling. Earling’s exploration of form serves as a cutting edge vehicle for the agency she reclaims for a figure whose presence in American history is cloaked in myth and shadow. And I picked it up at my local library!
- Favorite performance or live show: Zach Bryan. The Navy veteran from Oklahoma continues to complicate expectations as he sings about grief, adrenaline, and reckoning with too many experiences packed into a young life. Bryan is also incredibly prolific. It’s possible he releases two more albums by the time you read this.
- General highlight: Soultrane, Belfast. If you’re in Northern Ireland and want to hit the dance floor, this is the spot. It’s also an annual festival, held this year in February under the leadership of a great singer and visionary, Siobhan Brown. Based on our experiences at the 2024 #DouglassWeek after-party, be ready for serious funk.
Raeshma Razvi, Program Officer
- Favorite book: The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker. This was an important book at Mass Humanities in 2024. The chance to consider and discuss important ideas and practices around purpose, generosity and structure helped us clarify our ideas and values as we prepared to host three big gatherings in 2024. I continue to be indebted to Parker’s insights and practices, from the prescriptive to hilarious: “You have to design your gatherings for the kinds of connections you want to create” … and “‘Chill’ is a miserable attitude when it comes to hosting gatherings”.
- Favorite MH event: At the three convenings we hosted in Worcester, Holyoke and Boston around the theme “The Future of Storytelling,” I was incredibly grateful and excited to meet over 100 grantees face to face, see how lit up people are by the heartfelt work they do, and witness what an amazing cultural sector we’re part of in Massachusetts.
Jill Brevik, Director of Development
- Favorite performance or live show: Gregory Alan Isakov at the Green River Festival, Greenfield. After moving to Amherst almost five years ago, I finally made it out to the Green River Festival that I’d heard so much about. Too much to love: the Greenfield community as a whole, the beautiful fairgrounds surrounded by mountains, lots of activities for kids, good food, and yeah, one of my favorite musicians of all time, who managed to squeeze in a sun-soaked set during a weekend of raging thunderstorms. A good metaphor for 2024.
- Favorite book: Birthright, by George Abraham; winner of the 2021 Arab American Book Award. In October, I was honored to organize a Queers for Palestine Poetry Night at Sub Rosa in Northampton, through which I was introduced to George Abraham, writer-in-residence at Amherst College. George is an absolute treasure to have in our community. The event also featured queer Palestinian writers Mx. Yaffa and Hannah Moushabeck; together, they discussed generational trauma and the urgent role of poetry in their immediate communities, the Palestinian diaspora, and the global movement for liberation.
- Favorite MH event: Martín Espada readings. It’s hard to overstate the significance of getting to know Martín Espada (2024 Governor’s Award recipient) and hearing him read throughout year: first in his living room as he granted me and my colleague the opportunity to interview him leading up to the Governor’s Awards, then in his backyard at the Shelburne Falls Porch Fest (where his brilliant wife Lauren Marie Espada and longtime friend Paul Mariani also read), again at Wistariahurst alongside students and staff from our Clemente Course partner the Care Center, and finally, at our Governor’s Awards in the Humanities event at the JFK Library in Boston. He has taught me a lot, including the importance of flipping this narrative: “Poetry should go where it’s least expected. Poetry should go where it allegedly does not belong. Poetry should go to a so-called ‘non-traditional’ audience which is, in fact, the most traditional audience of all.” We look forward to celebrating the release of his new book, Jailbreak of Sparrows, this spring.
Latoya Bosworth, Program Officer
- Favorite performance or live show: I got to participate in a Story Slam for the first time in celebration of Juneteenth. Ancestral Bridges hosted the event at the Drake in Amherst. The Theme was ‘From Chains to Change.” It was a vulnerable moment for me to share my story in the format to audience of strangers and family.
- Favorite book: Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid. It was such an intimate look at the life and love of one of my heroes. We often look at historical figures, as just that, figures. This book is reminder that he was a man with feelings, and fear. I also learned so much about how others saw him, and how he saw himself. Beautifully written, and gripping. I cried three times while reading. Watching also felt like spilling secrets.
- Favorite TV show or film: Black Twitter: A People’s History on Hulu. This documentary was an affirmation for Black culture; our ability to create spaces for revolution and resilience and joy, event virtually and what happens when we let the world in. Culturally we develop our own languages and codes and shared experience despite how the world sees us.
- General highlight: In October I self-published my 15th book, Joy Worthy… the Little Guide to Experiencing All the Joy You Deserve and celebrated in my hometown of Springfield with a Q& A, Dr. Boz trivia, and a champagne post.
- Favorite MH event: Perhaps one of the most cathartic moments of my life was taking a photo with the 4th great granddaughter of Frederick Douglass, Nicole Morris during #DouglassWeek. It was a full circle moment, as my 4th great grandfather Perry and Frederick Douglass were enslaved as children on the same plantation in Maryland. 200 years later their descendants, FREE Black American women met across the globe on Belfast, Ireland.
Wes DeShano, Communications Manager
- Favorite book: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chioban. A completley mesmerizing tale that weaves narrative threads touching on World War II, illusions and magic, the Golden Age of comic books, and the yearning for family. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.
- Favorite TV show or film: Built Ecologies: Architecture and Environment, a 6-part series produced by the Museum of Modern Art’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment. If you’re interested in how designers, architects, and artists are pushing the envelope when it comes to putting human-made and nature-produced spaces in conversation, this is for you. For a local connection to Massachusetts, I recommend starting with the episode about aquariums as “theaters” of marine life, which features the New England Aquarium in Boston.
- Favorite MH event: our storytelling convenings in Worcester, Holyoke, and Boston. I had the great privilege of speaking with many Mass Humanities grantees, and learned so much about the vibrant culture sector here in Massachusetts. The highlight from these events, for me, was interviewing people about the meaningful objects that they brought in to the Worcester and Boston workshops. Objects are amazing touchstones for conversation, because they contain any number of stories, histories, identities, and meanings. I think that nothing could be more appropriate to put center stage at gatherings intended to imagine the future of storytelling within the context of humanities work.
Katherine Stevens, Director of Grants & Programs
- Favorite performance or live show: “The Heron’s Flight” Summer Spectacle at Double Edge Theatre. The heron, a creature air and flight, drops to earth, journeying through joys and trials, to make a new set of wings. As someone who left an academic career because I also believed that my way forward with the humanities was through, the performance touched me personally.
- Favorite book: This year I read two books by one of my favorite authors, Colm Toibin. Long Island, his sparely written and deeply felt story of longing and return. Bad Blood, his record of walking along the Irish Border in 1987, witnessing the way conflict and unhealed wounds ate at people on all sides.
- Favorite TV show or film: I have my colleague Raeshma to thank for introducing me to the BBC’s Gardener’s World. Sometimes you just need to watch a person enthusiastically digging up soil, watering seeds, clipping perennials, and encouraging you to do the same.
- General highlight: I visited family in counties Donegal and Tyrone for the first time in over twenty years; lay down in heather by the ocean, tromped up the mountain in the sheep pasture, talked late into the night and danced a little too. At Mass Humanities we support people finding their stories; it’s been good to take that inspiration into my own life.
- Favorite MH event: Impossible to choose! On Nov. 7, I went to visit Framingham’s Collective Journeys: Stories of Immigration, 1960 – Present at Framingham History Center. Participatory, community built, and generous in its storytelling. It was just the reminder I needed of the power of seeing each other’s stories.
