The Gordon Library is pleased to announce four new author events coming this spring in For a Change - our series of conversations with WPI authors featuring books that challenge us to change how we think, and the choices we make.
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On Thursday, March 26 at 1 pm in in the Gordon Library Conference Room (303) join us for a panel conversation about Decentering Science & Technology in Global Development: Co-Designing for Community Sustainability (2026, De Gruyter) led by the book’s editor and co-author, Professor Robert Krueger (SSPS). He will be joined by a few of his fellow co-authors featured in the book: Prof. Laureen Elgert (SSPS) and Prof. Yunus Doğan Telliel (HUA) along with PhD candidate Zahra Zarei Ardestani. The publisher writes: “Engineering and scientific interventions, especially Western interventions, in societies in the majority world, can no longer be left to the scientists and engineers coming from the west or channeling western ideals. In addressing these concerns, this volume brings new thinking, new concepts, and processes and procedures from a variety of disciplines and analytical lenses. It introduces a new development practice, from education to ideation and implementation to assessment. The book offers critical and compelling insights into what is wrong with current hegemonic paradigms of development and the concepts and tools we can use to advance a different direction that promotes dignity, community self-sufficiency, and sustainability." For more details, please see this event announcement.
On Thursday, April 9, we are thrilled to announce two new author events:
- On Thursday April 9 from 6:30-8pm, Regie Gibson, Inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will be our featured poet in our second annual Olive Higgins Prouty Poetry Celebration. Regie Gibson's reading will take place in the Hagglund Room at the Campus Center. This year’s program is hosted in partnership with WPI faculty Jim Cocola and Kris Boudreau, the Worcester County Poetry Association and the Clemente Course in the Humanities. More event details and an announcement are available.
- Earlier in the day on Thursday April 9 at 2pm, the Gordon Library will partner with the Global School to host a roundtable discussion of a new book, Building Equitable Climate Adaptation Partnerships in the US Caribbean, co-edited by Assistant Professor Sarah Molinari (DIGS) and Global School Dean Mimi Sheller. The book will be released on March 19, and includes several other WPI contributors, among them Seth Tuler, Sarah Strauss, and John-Michael Davis, who are part of the Caribbean Collaborative Action Network, a NOAA climate adaptation partnership team. This event will take place in the Gordon Library Conference Room (Room 303). More event details and an announcement are available.
Finally, on Wednesday April 29 at 3:00pm we are excited to welcome our first poetry reading by WPI alum, Gerald Yelle. Yelle's books include The Holyoke Diaries (Future Cycle, 2014), Dreaming Alone and with Others (Future Cycle, 2023), the bored, Evolution for the Hell of It (Alien Buddha, 2025), and Love Bomb (Alien Buddha, 2026). His chapbooks include No Place I Would Rather Be (Finishing Line, 2021) and A Box of Rooms (Bottlecap, 2022). He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yelle will be reading from his work in the Gordon Library Conference Room (Room 303). More event details and an announcement are forthcoming.
Please mark your calendars now for these events, and join us for explorations and conversations that celebrate and share the powerful role of books in making change.
Past events in this year’s author series have included:
- November 6: Cornel West Matters: Politics, Violence, Racism, and Religion in America (2024, WPI Press), with a conversation between author and WPI Professor Mahamadou Lamine Sagna (SSPS), and WPI Press Editor in Chief and Head, SSPS, Prof. Rob Krueger.
- November 20: Professor John Sanbonmatsu (HUA), led an exploration and conversation about his 2025 book The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals, and Ourselves (NYU Press). He was joined in conversation by Prof. Joel Brattin and Prof. Scott Barton.
- January 3: Matter of North: Essays on Glenn Gould and The Idea of North (2025, SUNY Press), edited by WPI Professor Brent Wetters. Prof. Wetters was joined in conversation by HUA Prof. Daniel DiMassa, and by musicologist and co-editor Anthony Cushing (who joined via Teams from Canada).
We look forward to welcoming you to more events in 26-27, including a conversation with Professor William B. Gould IV about his book, Those Who Travail & are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer (WPI Press, 2025). Professor Gould is the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Stanford Law School and formerly Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board under President Bill Clinton. He is a prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law and an influential voice in worker-management relations for more than fifty years. He is the recipient of five honorary doctorates for his significant contributions to the fields of labor law and labor relations. In this remarkable memoir, Gould ties his career in labor law and civil rights to his heritage, his upbringing, and his inspirations. Those Who Travail & are Heavy Laden also carries on the tradition of his great grandfather, the first William B. Gould, whose Civil War diary telling of his daring escape from slavery and service in the Union Navy he and his father William B. Gould III ’25 discovered and published as Diary of a Contraband.
