AG Literary Events
Thursday, August 27, 2026
5:00 pm-7:00 pm Eastern
Pascal Hall, 86 Pascal Ave, Rockport, Maine
The Pascal Hall Authors Series, presented in partnership with the Lesher Family Foundation and Maine Media Workshops + College, brings free literary events to the community in Rockport, ME each summer.
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize) and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He was named the 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi, and is a fellow of the British Academy.
Caroline Bicks is a scholar of early modern literature who has published widely on Shakespeare’s works and world. In 2017, she left Boston College to become the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. The endowed Chair’s mission is to support the public humanities, a challenge that Bicks has embraced by giving talks around the state to a wide variety of audiences, and bringing award-winning fiction writers, journalists, educators, and activists to speak and work with different Maine communities. The position also allowed her to develop a working relationship with Stephen King that led to him granting her first-of-its kind access to his personal papers, and to her writing a book about what she discovered, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026). The uniquely public-facing nature of her position as King Chair complements the creative work she has delivered to popular audiences over the years across various media platforms, including the Modern Love column for the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and her Everyday Shakespeare podcast.
