Words, Wit & Wisdom

A Day of Words, Wit and Wisdom (W3) has been WE CAN’s signature event and primary fundraiser since 2005. We all look forward to this day because of the inspiration, humor, generosity, and emotion that is shared by all who attend.

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WE CAN’s 16th Words, Wit and Wisdom event will take place on Thursday, June 2, from 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM at the Wychmere Beach Club in Harwich Port. 

We are excited to announce the 2022 “W3” authors and the 2022 WE CAN Woman of the Year.

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Please take a moment to acknowledge all of our sponsors. The great success of this fundraising event depends on their generosity.

Premier Event Sponsor

Pulitzer Prize Sponsors

Walt Whitman Award Sponsors

Judy Cornwell

Ann Marie Doherty

Green Family of Harwich

Debbie and John Todd

Mariann Youniss

O'Henry Award Sponsors

Florence Koplow

Pen-Faulkner Award Sponsors

Karen and Tony Pierson 

Nan Poor

Zammer Foundation of Cape Cod

Pen-Hemmingway Award Sponsors

Jablonski Consulting Group

The Pavillion Rehabilitation and Nursing Center

Nancy Ferris

Media Sponsor

Jane Hamilton

Emcee

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Jane Hamilton’s novels have won literary prizes, been made into films, have been international best-sellers, and two of them, The Book of Ruth, and A Map of The World, were selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Allure, the Oprah Magazine, Elle, and various anthologies. Her seventh novel, The Excellent Lombards was published in April 2016. She’s taught in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, at Carleton College, and has done workshops in the US and in Italy.  She’s married to an apple farmer and lives in Wisconsin.

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Catherine D'Amato

Woman of the Year​

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A tireless advocate for the hungry for more than 40 years, Catherine D’Amato assumed the leadership of GBFB in 1995. During her tenure, she has transformed GBFB into a $100 million charitable business and increased GBFB’s distribution from 7.5 million meals a year to more than 51 million healthy meals. She has grown GBFB’s network to include more than 500 partner food pantries, meal programs and shelters across the 190 cities and towns of Eastern Massachusetts. 

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Under D’Amato’s guidance, GBFB has focused on providing nutritious food to those struggling with hunger and became one of the first food banks in the U.S. to establish a health and research team making the critical connection between hunger and health.  D’Amato led GBFB’s partnership with Children’s HealthWatch, a nonpartisan research organization, to undertake groundbreaking research on the health-related costs of hunger in Massachusetts.  The study found that hunger cost Massachusetts at least $2.4 billion a year. Under her leadership, GBFB also launched its Hunger Free 2028 campaign with the ambitious goal of ensuring all those in need in Eastern Massachusetts have reliable access to enough high-quality food for three healthy meals a day by 2028. 

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Beyond her role at GBFB, D'Amato is the founder of the Hunger to Health Collaboratory (H2HC), a group of cross-sector stakeholders developing innovative solutions to reduce the health consequences of hunger. D’Amato currently serves on the board of trustees of Fidelity Charitable and Eastern Bank; the board of directors of the Forsyth Institute and the Massachusetts Food Association.

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Michael Ruhlman

Author

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Michael Ruhlman attended the Culinary Institute of America as a journalist in whites in order to write a book about what you need to know in order to be a chef. He came out with the ability to cook and it redirected his life.

Since The Making of a Chef, Ruhlman has written more than twenty-five books of non-fiction, fiction, memoir and cookbooks, the latter both on his own and as a collaborator with chefs such as Thomas Keller and Eric Ripert. He’s best known for his writing about food and cooking, both at home (Ratio, Ruhlman’s Twenty: Twenty Techniques, 100 Recipes, a Cook’s Manifesto) and in professional kitchens (the trilogy Making of a Chef, Soul of a Chef, Reach of a Chef), and for writing about the craft of Charcuterie in three books (Pâté, Rillette, Confit, in 2019, all with chef Brian Polcyn). A contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications, his most recent books are Grocery: The buying and Selling of Food in America and From Scratch: 10 Meals, 150 Recipes, and. Techniques You Will Use Over and Over, October 2019. He lives in Providence, RI, and New York City with his wife, the writer Ann Hood.

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Anna Solomon

Author

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Anna Solomon is the author of three novels—The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride—and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, One Story, The Boston Globe, Tablet, and elsewhere. Anna is the recipient of awards from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, and The Missouri Review, among others, and her short story “The Lobster Mafia Story” was Boston’s One City One Story read. Co-editor with Eleanor Henderson of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, Anna previously worked as an award-winning journalist for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth. She teaches at Barnard College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. Born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Anna now lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

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Kirstin Valdez Quade

Author

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Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds (W. W. Norton, April 2021), which was selected for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club, the Barnes & Noble Book Club, and BuzzFeed’s book club. It is a most anticipated book of 2021 by O, the Oprah Magazine, The Week, Electric Lit, and The Millions. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (W. W. Norton), won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Princeton.