Author Monica Wood to Give Dec. 5 Reading

Award-winning author Monica Wood will give a reading at Westminster Dec. 5 as a part of the school’s “Friday Nights in Gund,” a series of readings, lectures and concerts held at Westminster during the academic year. The student readers will be Sixth Formers Hadley Smith, Megan Richard and Aaron Poston, the winners of the school’s This I Believe Essay Writing Contest.
 
Wood is the author of “When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine,” a New England best-seller, No. 1 best-seller in Maine, Oprah magazine summer-reading pick, and winner of the May Sarton Memoir Award and the Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the novel “Any Bitter Thing,” an ABA best-seller and Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes “Ernie’s Ark,” which has been excerpted on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and selected by several towns and cities as their “One Book, One Community” read; “My Only Story,” a finalist for the Kate Chopin Award; and “Secret Language,” her first novel. Her widely anthologized short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and been featured on public radio.
 
Wood also writes books for writers and teachers. Her nonfiction has appeared in Oprah, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Parade and many other publications. Her play, “Papermaker,” will be produced in 2015 at Portland Stage in Portland, Maine, and novel “The Wakening World,” which has already sold foreign rights in several European countries, will be published in 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
 
Wood’s Westminster School reading is free and open to the public and will begin at 7 p.m. in the Gund Reading Room of Armour Academic Center. Refreshments will be served after the presentation and ample parking will be available in the parking lot adjacent to Armour Academic Center.
 
The Friday Nights in Gund series is made possible by generous grants from The Ensign Bickford Foundation and the Ford-Goldfarb English Department Enrichment Fund.