Reading: Michelle Cacho Negrete

Michelle Cacho-Negrete reading her award winning and Pushcart nominated essay, "Winter," which was published in The Union of Concerned Scientists' anthology, Thoreau's Legacy. Ms. Cacho-Negrete is a retired social worker in Portland Maine and a full-time writer. She was born in a Brooklyn ghetto and many of her essays are about that experience. Four of Michelle's essays have been selected as notable of the year and one won Best of The Net. Ms. Cacho-Negrete's work is in four anthologies in addition to Thoreau's Legacy, and her essay "Tell me Something" is in the Norton College Anthology. Six of her essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and "Street Kid" was a runner-up in the Brooklyn Literary Arts Contest. She has had 60 publications in, among others, The Sun, North American Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Under The Sun, and Silk Road. After the 2016 election Michelle and three other women formed a free feminist speakers' bureau that goes to high schools, colleges and other organizations to explain women's history, women's rights, abuse against women and ways to move forward.

In the words of Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun Magazine and reviewer of Stealing, Cacho-Negrete's debut collection of essays, "Michelle writes with grace and clear-eyed unsentimental vision." Gin Mackey, author of Disappear our Dead states, "Here is the power of the written word: Alone in his room, the reader feels a strengthened connection to all of humanity." Barry Lyga, best selling YA writer states "Michelle explores the intricacies of our world in essays simultaneously unique and universal."