For the first time, a revealing interview about Celia Thaxter of the Isles of Shoals with her granddaughter Rosamond Thaxter of Kittery Point, Maine, has been published.

Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) was the beloved poet, writer and literary friend and hostess to John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Childe Hassam, and many other creative luminaries of the 19th century. They visited and worked at Celia's cottage salon on the Isles of Shoals.

Julia Older visited Rosamond Thaxter in 1978 as part of her research in writing the biographical novel The Island Queen; Celia Thaxter of the Isles of Shoals.

Rosamond spoke with Older about Celia's son Karl (the first child born on the Shoals in a century) and how the abolitionist poet Whittier was the love of Celia's life.

Last month the personalized, eight-page interview in a partial Q&A format was published in the Number 5 2007 issue of Entelechy International; A Journal of Contemporary Ideas. The handsome annual of poetry, short stories, memoirs and photographic essays is published at New England College in Henniker, N.H.

Sylva Boyadjian-Haddad is editor-in-chief, Maura MacNeil, editor, Farid Haddad, production director.

Copies of the Number 5 issue are available for $12.00 each at New England College, 98 Bridge Street, Henniker, NH 03242. E-mail: entelechy@nec.edu

The NH Writers' Project annual BookSampler, distributed to bookstores in New Hampshire during the holiday season, includes a detailed description of Julia Older's booklength poem Tahirih Unveiled about the Persian religious prodigy who fought for the emancipation of women.

Tahirih of Persia (1818-1854), a rare and too little known religious leader of her time, has become an inspiration for our time.

The cover of Tahirih Unveiled shows Older wearing one of her poems in gold and silver thread stitched in Farsi by a member of an Afghan women's handwork collective.

Tahirih Unveiled is published by Turning Point Books and available online here also.