McCourt will be the featured for the festival Nov. 13.
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Timothy Gager and Doug Holder, founders of the Somerville News Writers Festival, announced the lineup today for the November 13, 2010 event to be held at the Arts Armory on Highland Avenue in Somerville. Gager, the founder of the acclaimed Dire reading series as well as a well-published author in many genres, and Holder, the arts editor of The Somerville News, and a member of the faculty of Endicott College in Beverly and Bunker Hill Community College are: “Very excited about another literary extravaganza,” said Gager. This year the Festival will feature such writers and poets as Malachy McCourt, Rusty Barnes, Michelle Hoover, Sam Cornish, David Ferry, Ethan Gilsdorf, Steve Almond, Matha Collins, and others.

Holder and Gager proposed the festival to the board of The Somerville News in the summer of 2003 and since then the festival has established itself regionally and to some extent nationally. Over the years poets and writers such as Robert Olen Butler, Sam Cornish, Tom Perrotta, Robert Pinsky, Robert Olen Butler, Franz Wright, Lan Samantha Chang, Nick Flynn, David Godine, Sue Miller and many others have read for the Festival. Below is the lineup of poets and writers:
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Prose
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Malachy McCourt – As well as being the co-author of the play A Couple of Blaguards with his brother Frank, Malachy has written his own New York Times bestseller memoir, A Monk Swimming, published by Hyperion Press.
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Steve Almond is the author of the short story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction books Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked). His most recent book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, which comes with a ‘Bitchin soundtrack’.
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Rusty Barnes – He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over 150 journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press published a collection of his flash fiction, Breaking it Down, in November 2007.
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Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street. She has published fiction in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best New American Voices, among others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction.
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Ethan Gilsdorf is an American writer, poet, editor, critic, teacher and journalist. He has lived in Northampton and Amherst, Massachusetts; Brattleboro, Vermont; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Paris, France; and currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms (The Lyons Press).
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Jennifer Haigh (born 1968) is an American novelist and short story writer. She attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2002. Her fiction has been published in Granta, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Good Housekeeping, and many other publications.Her third novel, The Condition, was published by HarperCollins in July, 2008. It traces the dissolution of a proper New England family when their only daughter is diagnosed with Turner’s Syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that keeps her from going through puberty.

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Poets
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Sam Cornish (b. 1935) – First Boston Poet Laureate, poet, essayist, editor of children’s literature, photographer, educator, and figure in the Black Arts movement. From his older brother Herman he learned early the lessons of the street, which he later would incorporate into a street-tough observancy in his poetry. His latest collection of poetry is Apron Full of Beans (CavanKerry Press).
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David Ferry – From 1952 until his retirement in 1989, David Ferry taught at Wellesley College where he was, for many years, the chairman of the English Department. He now holds the title Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley. He has also taught writing at Boston University. Ferry was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, and he is a fellow of the Academy of American Poets. In 2000, Ferry’s book of new and selected poems and translations, entitled Of No Country I Know, received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress (for the best work of poetry for the previous two years). He is the author of a critically praised verse rendering of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.
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Martha Collins is the author of Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Blue Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Collins’ chapbook Sheer (Barnwood, 2008) is her most recent publication. In spring 2010, she is serving as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University
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Diana Der-Hovanessian, New England born poet, was twice a Fulbright professor of American Poetry and is the author of more than 23 books of poetry and translations. She serves as president of the New England Poetry Club.
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Fred Marchant  is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Looking House (2009), selected by the Barnes and Noble Review as one of the ten best books of poetry of 2009. He is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947. With Nguyen Ba Chung, he has co-translated From Another Corner of My Yard, an historic book of poems by the contemporary Vietnamese poet, Tran Dang Khoa. He has taught in workshops and conferences across the country, including the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, NH, at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, and at the William Joiner Center at UMass Boston. In 2010 the New England Poetry Club conferred on him the May Sarton Award, for work that has inspired other poets. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and The Poetry Center at Suffolk University and lives in Arlington.