- Home
- Schedule
- Performers
- Authors
- Directions and Lodging
- Sponsors
- Exhibitors
- Awards
- Press
- Contact Us
- Volunteer
- For Teachers
The Festival features maritime and ethnic music that relates to the commercial fishing industry.
Send press packet and sample recording to:
Working Waterfront Festival
c/o CEDC
PO Box 6553
New Bedford, MA 02742-6553.
Lobster boat captain and New York Times bestselling author Linda Greenlaw returns to the Working Waterfront Festival this year with her latest book, a mystery novel due out this summer. Slipknot signals the exciting debut of a snappy, spirited, and irresistible mystery series featuring marine investigator Jane Bunker.
Linda Greenlaw is the author of the bestsellers The Hungry Ocean, All Fishermen Are Liars, The Lobster Chronicles and Recipes from a Very Small Island. She lives on Isle au Haut, Maine, where she captains a lobster boat.
Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, began fishing the bays off the Gulf Coast of Texas at the age of eight. By 24 she was a boat captain. In 1989, while running her brother's fish house at the docks and mending nets, she read a newspaper article that listed her home of Calhoun County as the number one toxic polluter in the country. She set up a meeting in the town hall to discuss what the chemical plants were doing to the bays and thus began her life as an environmental activist. Threatened by thugs and despised by her neighbors, Diane insisted the truth be told and that Formosa Plastics stop dumping toxins into the bay. Her work on behalf of the people and aquatic life of Seadrift, Texas, has won her a number of awards including: National Fisherman Magazine Award, Mother Jones’s Hell Raiser of the Month, Louis Gibb’s Environmental Lifetime Award, Louisiana Environmental Action (LEAN) Award and others. An Unreasonable Woman is Diane’s first book.
Molly Bang is an award winning children's book illustrator and author. Her works include 3 Caldecott Honor Books: Ten, Nine, Eight, The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, and When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry, which also won a Jane Addams Honor Award and the Arbuthnot Award. The Paper Crane won the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award in 1987; Goose won the School of Library Journal Best Book of 1996 and another work, Common Ground: The Water, Earth, and Air We Share, won the prestigious Giverny Book Award in 1998 for the best children's science picture book. Her latest book, My Light, is an ALA Notable book.
Galon L. Barlow, Jr., known to most as Skip, grew up in a fishing family on Cape Cod. He is a coastal, inshore fisherman with years of experience dealing with the trials and tribulations that come with this lifestyle. He has worked on many projects along the East Coast dealing with fisheries enhancement and habitat reclamation. An avid scuba diver, Galon has observed many hidden changes under the sea. His close ties to the sea are enhanced by his family's centuries of seafaring. Galon has the support of a large and extended family of eight children and eleven grandchildren. He has spent countless hours with them, always ready to entertain them on a moment's notice with a new story. He is author of a three part series of short adventure stories based on fact and Barlow family legend.
Dawn Clifton-Tripp is the critically-acclaimed author of Moon Tide, the first in a trilogy of novels set on Westport Point (MA) that were optioned by Random House. Dawn's latest novel is The Season of Open Water. Set against the backdrop of 1920's prohibition, rum-running and the stock market crash of 1929, The Season of Open Water (Random House) introduces Bridge, a headstrong young woman on the verge of awakening to her own desires.
Sandy MacFarlane was the first municipal Shellfish Biologist in Massachusetts and was also the first Conservation Administrator in the town of Orleans. Retired from the town, she founded Coastal Resource Specialists, a company dealing with shellfish issues. She is the author of Rowing Forward, Looking Back, a chronicle of life in a small coastal community bombarded by development pressures.
Tiggie Peluso arrived on Cape Cod in 1946 after serving in the Army in World War II, to begin a career in commercial fishing. He became proficient in four separate types of fishing—longlining for cod, haddock and halibut; shellfishing for scallops, and clams, rod and reel and flyfishing for striped bass; and fresh water fishing—an unusual achievement. He was a founding member and president of the Chatham Seafood Coop, the second largest fishermen's cooperative in New England.
In a surprising collaboration, MacFarlane and Peluso co-authored Tiggie: The Lure and Lore of Commercial Fishing in New England. More than a memoir or a how-to book, it combines the virtues of each. With detailed insights into the catching of fish and moving reflections on the beauty of the rituals, the surroundings, the characters, it captures the moments and the moods of a vanishing way of life.
Jerry Pallotta began writing children's books in 1986 when he was 32 years old. He got the idea for his first book, The Ocean Alphabet Book, while reading to his own children and remembering all the fun he had growing up on Peggotty Beach in Scituate, Massachusetts. This first self-published title established Jerry's creative process; Jerry wrote, edited the text, hired his own illustrator, designed the book, bought the paper and rented the press time. The success of The Ocean Alphabet Book inspired a series of nonfiction alphabet books, which includes Icky Bug Alphabet, Jet Alphabet and Flower Alphabet.
Over the years Mr. Pallotta has written children's books on many subjects, but the ocean has always been a favorite. His math series includes Underwater Counting Even Numbers and Underwater Counting Odd Numbers. He has also written several other fishy titles including Dory Story and Going Lobstering. Jerry has been to over 3000 schools and conferences around the country. He tells kids everywhere to "read a zillion books!"