By Tom Meek
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Cantabrigian teacher and poet Charles Coe died Friday Nov. 21.
The spirit of creativity in Cambridge dimmed last week when longtime resident, teacher and poet Charles Coe died Monday from complications related to prostate cancer surgery. His death was sudden and stunned many. In addition to touching people with his words, often delivered in a deep, mellifluous baritone, Coe offered mentorship, leadership and a sense of community. He was 73.
He was an omnipresent figure in local literary circles: the Mass Poetry Festival, long-running literary salons across Cambridge and Somerville, the Writers’ Room, Black Writers Reading series, arts advocacy boards. If there was a gathering where people were wrestling with words or art or community, chances were good Coe had either helped organize it or slipped quietly into a seat to listen.
Longtime friend and filmmaker Roberto Mighty said he was “heartbroken” by the news and described Coe, beyond his status as a celebrated artist, as “a great cook with a wicked sense of humor and world-class connector.”
Born in Indianapolis, Coe moved to Boston in the mid-1970s after dropping out of college and a brief stint in a Motown cover band in Nashville, Tennessee. Here he worked as a musician and food server until he found his voice as a poet in the early 1990s, publishing his first collection in 1999. Coe, who lived in Huron Village, also worked for the Mass Cultural Council for nearly 20 years, received an honorary doctorate and, in recent years, taught poetry and writing at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. He had been an artist-in-residence and teacher at various literary and art institutions.
Coe published five volumes of poetry and a novella. His 2013 collection about grief, sense of place and mortality was titled “Memento Mori,” loosely translated from Latin as “remember that you must die.” He was working on a family memoir inspired by his sister’s death after a protracted battle with liver cancer, and had several screenplays in progress.
Coe often mixed art forms and curated the voices of others. As an artist-in-residence at the Boston Public Library in 2017, he put together a “What You Don’t Know About Me” project interviewing residents of Mission Hill for first-person texts to accompany their photos. He collaborated with Ken Field of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic for a music and poetry project “A Symphony of Crickets,” which played on the Cape and locally. Field described their collaboration as an “honor.”
He also understood joy. Coe was a singer – jazz, blues, gospel – and his readings sometimes felt concert-like, the poems lifted by a subtle musicality that carried the room. He could play the didgeridoo and performed with it at many of his poetry gatherings. His laugh, unmistakable and warm, could shift the energy of even the most brittle panel discussion or open mic.
Coe was also a quiet yet staunch activist, maybe more so as a curator of curiosity and creativity. As a Black man in Boston who lived through the worst of Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill years and the divisiveness of the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989, he saw much change – and not. His poem “For the Ancient Boston Bar with Neon Shamrocks in the Windows, Recently Departed,” details an incident at an Irish bar where he was not welcomed.
His insight into the human condition was sage, and he could distill it into a quick, witty observation in social media posts that offered biting wisdom with a warm, avuncular chuckle, or emotionally provocative barbs in meter. He was also funny and reflective. One recent poem imagined the quirky German filmmaker Werner Herzog riding the T.
Beyond Coe’s published works, he will live on in Mighty’s 2016 short documentary, “Charles Coe: Man of Letters,” which does a deft job of capturing the poet’s warmth and unmistakable creative presence. Mighty also adapted one of Coe’s poems into a short film. Coe is survived by a nephew, Bryan Hughes (Stacy), who lives in Indianapolis, and his family.
The following lines from the poem “Crickets” that Coe often read when on tour with Field, encapsulates the heaviness of the moment.
If now’s a time for ending, then where do we go from here?
There’s always so much more
Although it seems we’re saying goodbye
We’re not really saying goodbye.
Said Huron Village neighbor and writing mentee Jenny Talbot, “Everyone on our street loved Charles, and we will miss him terribly.”
A GoFundMe page will be launched in the next few days to help with the settlement of Coe’s affairs.
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