CONCORD FESTIVAL OF AUTHORS 2026
Steve Edwards
Steve Edwards is the author of the memoir Breaking into the Backcountry, the story of his seven months as caretaker of a remote homestead along the federally designated “Wild and Scenic Rogue River” in Oregon during the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. His second book Rare Good: Essays on Art, Autism, and Astonishment is forthcoming in October 2026. Steve's essays have most recently appeared in The Yale Review, The Sun, Orion Magazine, Literary Hub, and Longreads. His essay "Yellow Band" was one of the most-read prose works in The Yale Review in 2024. He is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Fiction/Nonfiction. He was the 2025 writer-in-residence at the historic Concord Free Public Library. Steve lives in Metrowest Boston with his wife and son.
Though the number astonishes him, Steve has been teaching college writing for twenty-five years, with stops along the way at Purdue University, Emerson College, Simmons College, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and, for more than a decade, he has been a professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. A highlight of his teaching career has been leading the original course Neurodiversity in Literature and Life at Tufts University's Experimental College. Steve has led workshops with 27 Powers and Larksong Writers Place.
For more information, please visit https://www.steveedwardswriter.com/
Steve Edwards
Author of
Rare Good: Essays on Art, Autism, and Astonishment
Monday, October 19, 2026, 6:00 PM
Concord Free Public Library, Goodwin Forum, 129 Main Street
Join Steve Edwards, the 2025 Concord Free Public Library Writer-In-Residence, for a discussion of his new book Rare Good: Essays on Art Autism, and Astonishment.
Steve Edwards was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties, altering his relationship to writing and family. He discovered what he had always known but never said: His compulsion to create was more than just a pursuit of self-expression. Faced with a mix of belief and disbelief from those who knew him, and full of questions himself, he committed to a new sense of wonder and pursuit of revelation.
Rare Good offers insights into Edwards’s experience of the awe that only art, disability, and loved ones can bring. Raising a disabled child and delving into acknowledging his own mindedness, he explores the struggles of communicating and finding care, the joy of gathering as community, and the astonishing gifts that art and education offer us, especially when we acknowledge the contributions of disabled artists past and present. Drawing on times of heartbreak transformed into determination, Edwards describes his ongoing desire to find a way together. A singular work of lyric nonfiction, Rare Good is a reminder and balm for all who might feel different.
Reviews of Rare Good
“Steve Edwards has written a stunning book of essays that are attentive to the weather, bluebirds, perilous classrooms, pies baking in kitchens, and the fragile negotiations that make up a life lived inside our nervous systems.”
“Rare Good is about the natures in which we live—our environments, our bodies, our senses, our minds—and the sunlight and storms that pass through them. It feels like having a beautiful, long conversation with an unusually wise and observant friend.”
Other Work
