This building was the home of the Boston Center for Adult Education for many years. Founded in 1933, it was the first private, nonprofit adult education center in New England. It offered a range of courses in the humanities, arts, sciences, and professional development. One participant whose course at the Center led to a career in poetry was Anne Gray Sexton (1928-74). At the age of twenty-eight she took John Holmes’s poetry workshop. She began writing poetry as mental therapy, but soon became well known. Suffering from mental depression, she once said, “Poetry saved my life.” She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Live or Die, in 1967. Although she died by suicide, many of her poems call out for life. She said, “I say Live, Live because of the sun/the dream, the excitable gift.”
