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April 30, 2025: Common falcons

Today we're spending all our time in higher education.

Merriam-Webster Senior Editor and UMass Amherst alumna Emily Brewster joins us on the upper floors of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library to meet with digital content editor Lauren Hubbard. She introduces us to the library’s most notorious residents, the peregrine falcons, with names that should be of particular interest to our Word Nerd. The birds making their roost and catching attention with eggs close to hatching.

And, just down the street at Amherst College, there is a revered literary publication called “The Common” that is celebrating its 25th year of publication. And on the last day of National Poetry Month, we talk with Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker and student interns Kei Lim and Aidan Cooper about the place of poetry and prose in a nation that continues to chip away at the arts.

Christopher “Monte'' Belmonte is host and executive producer of NEPM's The Fabulous 413. He was born and raised in Massachusetts and has been a radio host in western Massachusetts for the last 20 years — the last 17 of them as host of Mornings with Monte on The River 93.9/WRSI.
Kaliis Smith is a radio host and producer for NEPM's The Fabulous 413. She was most recently host and producer at The River 93.9/WRSI where she appeared on Mornings with Monte for the Nerdwatch segment and hosted weekday evenings.