Sacred Threads Fundraiser: An Evening with Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith, author of multiple award-winning books including Good Bones and the recently released A Suit or a Suitcase, is widely celebrated for her luminous writing and powerful exploration of resilience, identity, and personal transformation. The evening will open with Lisa Hughes, WBZ-TV news anchor, and feature a conversation moderated by Lisa Simmons, producer, director and curator of the Roxbury Film Festival and contributor to GBH’s The Culture Show.
As Sacred Threads’ signature fundraising event, the evening plays a vital role in sustaining the organization’s mission. Founded in 2009, Sacred Threads is a community that strengthens women’s spiritual connections and sense of meaning across all life’s seasons through inclusive programs and a culture of compassion and support. Through workshops, guest speakers, women’s groups, and individual support, Sacred Threads’ programs bring about more resilience, hope, compassion, and well-being that are especially needed in our current times.
The evening will also include a special tribute honoring Sacred Threads’ founders, Marie LaBollita, SC, and Rosemary Mulvihill, CSJ, longtime spiritual leaders who have profoundly impacted women’s lives through the organization.
Tickets: $60
Note: This event will be held at the Newton Community Stage, 15 Walnut Park, Newton, MA
Instant New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space.
About A Suit or a Suitcase:
The title of Maggie Smith’s new collection comes from the eponymous poem:
You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.
But you want one specific thing,
so here—I’ll miss my body. I’ll miss
its companionship, how it’s traveled
with me, never leaving me—& by me,
I mean my mind.
my body hasn’t traveled with me.
I’ve traveled inside it.
Do I wear it, or does it carry me?
Is the body a suit, or a suitcase?
Within, poems turn over the strange relationships between the body and the mind, the self and the world. With her signature tenderness and clarity of observation, and with stunning swoops of imagination, Smith considers—and reconsiders—what it is to be human: Does one life matter in the grand scheme of space and time? How can it be that we are the same people we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, but also different people? And could there be more to life, just beyond the borders of we can experience?
Each poem is an ode to the power of our minds, and proof that both a life and a self, whether within a suit or a suitcase, is infinitely expandable.
About Maggie Smith:
Maggie Smith is the author of seven award-winning books: Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Lamp of the Body, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Good Bones, named by the Washington Post as one of the Five Best Poetry Books of 2017, Keep Moving, and Goldenrod. Her most recent poetry collection, A Suit or a Suitcase, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press in 2026. The title poem of Good Bones was called the “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Smith’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, The Believer, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. A Pushcart Prize winner, Smith has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is host of the poetry podcast, The Slowdown.