Charles Coe, the poet and storyteller and teacher and musician (his beloved didgeridoo) and longtime arts administrator for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, was found dead in his Cambridge residence last Friday evening, Nov. 21, according to Cambridge Police. He was 73.
Charles approached life with an inspiring open-hearted curiosity and humor, while also frankly addressing, as a Black man from Indianapolis, Indiana, the racism of our society.
Charles had lived in the Boston area since 1975. He wrote five books of poetry. He was a 2017 Artist-in-Residence for the city of Boston, collecting oral histories of people who lived and worked in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood. He always seemed to be striking up conversations.
He had recently returned home, where he lived alone, to recover from surgery for prostate cancer. “I’m trying to stay patient while my body slowly knits itself back together,” he wrote Nov. 15 on Facebook, where he had nearly 5,000 friends and followers. He was scheduled to give a holiday reading at Cambridge’s New School for Music on Dec. 7. His sudden death—the word is perhaps from a heart attack—arrives as a terrible surprise.
Keefe Funeral Homes appears to be handling things: https://www.keefefuneralhome.com/…/charles-d-coe/5661283/
