2026 Festival News
Five Cape Cod Writers to Read at the Provincetown Book Festival on Sunday, September 27, 9:00 a.m.
Provincetown, MA—The Provincetown Book Festival will honor local writers at 9:00 a.m., Sunday, September 27, with a curated reading by local and regional authors, chosen by Provincetown author Dennis Minsky The selected writers are Judy Bolton-Fasman, Andreea Ceplinschi, Christopher Mirabile, Tracey Palmer, and Julia Thacker. Their biographies appear below.
Dennis Minsky is a well-known Outer Cape naturalist and the author of two recent books of essays and observations, Little Sister Sand: Finding the Wild in Provincetown and Peculiar and Superior: A Year Rounder in Provincetown. For this event, dubbed “Reading Local,” Minsky reviewed 27 submissions from local and regional writers.
The selected writers will be reading fiction and poetry. Minsky commented, “There was a lot of very good writing. These were chosen partly because of the way they go together.”
Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of ASYLUM: A Memoir of Family Secrets from Mandel Vilar Press. Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers, including the New York Times and Boston Globe, essay anthologies, and literary magazines. She has been honored with fellowships from Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Mineral School, and Vermont Studio Center. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Judy’s work has also been nominated for the Best American Essay series.
Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian immigrant writer and blue-collar wash-ashore living in Provincetown for 22 years. She’s fully adapted to the town's bipolar seasonal cycles and spends summers working doubles between two jobs and winters writing and dreaming of a de-capitalized matriarchal society where nurturing human connection is valued more than investment portfolios, credit scores, and other plutocratic superstitions. Her writing has appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine, One Art, Wild Roof Journal, The Quarter(ly), Club Plum, JAKE the anti-literary magazine, Does It Have Pockets, and elsewhere.
Christopher Mirabile was born to books. The middle child of a small-town librarian, by the time he was an honors English major at Colgate University, he was certain he would write fiction. Life had other plans. A career in business and law, years spent mentoring and co-founding startups, and several nonfiction books written along the way all came first, while the novels he always intended to write waited patiently in the background. It took a pandemic, some turbulent times, and a few years of van life—camping across the United States and Canada with his wife and dogs—to finally clear the headspace and bring that long-delayed ambition into focus. Somewhere out in open country, Silas Lopez came into being: a plainspoken former ranch hand who washes up as a police chief at the far tip of Cape Cod. The Silas Lopez Mysteries are Christopher's way of writing about belonging, justice, and the particular magic of Provincetown, the town he now calls home year-round. And now that the series is underway, Christopher can’t imagine leaving Silas and Wren behind—he suspects Silas still has plenty of stories left to tell. When he isn't writing, he's out in the dunes with his wife, hiking with his dogs (one of whom may recognize himself in these pages), or behind a camera somewhere along the Outer Cape.
Tracey Palmer is a graduate of GrubStreet’s yearlong, MFA-level Novel Incubator program in Boston. She holds a bachelor’s degree in American literature from George Washington University, a master’s in communications from Suffolk University, and studied Shakespeare at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She is a communications consultant and writer for MIT; a contributor to Cognoscenti at WBUR, Boston’s NPR radio station; and co-editor of the novel-writing blog Dead Darlings. The Texas League of Writers named her yet-to-be-published novel, THE CAGE, a finalist in its manuscript competition. A Massachusetts native, Tracey lives south of Boston with her husband and is the mother of two grown daughters who inspire her every day. Her debut novel, Alive Day, will be published April 13, 2027, by Galiot Press.
Twice a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Julia Thacker now lives in Arlington. She returns to FAWC for extended periods as part of their Returning Residency Program each spring and fall. Several of the poems in her collection are set in Provincetown. Currently, TO WILDNESS is longlisted for a 2026 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. Her poetry and fiction have also appeared in The New Republic, Poetry International, Bennington Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Council, the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. She has taught creative writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as poet-in-residence in elementary schools throughout the state. Her website is www.juliathacker.com
The Provincetown Book Festival is supported by many sponsors, including the Friends of the Provincetown Library, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Provincetown Tourism Fund.