Friday--November 19-- Brookline Booksmith -- 7:00PM

Amanda Jimenez was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. She received her BA in English/Women’s Studies from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. In need of more city and less cows, she decided to come back north and pursue her MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing has changed a lot throughout her time at Emerson, but she has been obsessed with magical realism and sex for a while.
Currently, she lives in Boston and spends her free time planning a kick-ass wedding.






Alex Strum is originally from Holliston, Mass. He lived in New York for six years before moving back to attend grad school at Emerson College, where he is now in his third year as an MFA fiction candidate. He will be reading an eclectic mix of short shorts. His current cell phone ring tone is "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.







Sophie Grimes, originally from Chicago, completed her undergrad at Oberlin College. She majored in both Creative Writing, and East Asian Studies with a focus in Chinese Language. After graduating, she spent two years in Kunming, China as an Oberlin Shansi fellow. There, she taught English and continued to study Mandarin. Sophie is currently at Boston University pursuing an MFA in poetry. She is also teaching BU undergrads creative writing, showing them the awesomeness of language and the cool things you can do with it.






Antonio Elefano is a fiction writer and playwright currently living in
Boston, MA. He grew up in Port Neches, Texas and received his BA in
English from Texas A&M University. He is a two-time Charles Gordone
Award winner for Best Fiction of 2001 and Best Play of 2002. In 2005,
he received his JD from Yale Law School and through the summer of 2010
practiced corporate law at Kaye Scholer LLP in New York. He is
currently working toward his MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at
Boston University.





S.D. Mullaney is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His first full-length collection of poems, Follow the Wolf Moon, appeared in January 2005. His poems have appeared and/or will appear in The New York Review, Hanging Loose, Breakwater, and Hoi Polloi. He is a regular contributor to the online political journal Pemmican. Other work has been featured on WOMR 92.1 FM, Radio Provincetown and WERS 88.9 FM, Boston.





Andra Hibbert is a queer writer pursuing an MFA in fiction at UMass Boston. She grew up in northern Vermont and attended Williams College. Before focusing on understanding people (mainly herself) through telling stories she tried to understand them through analyzing demographic data. She prefers words, but misses right answers. She has worked as an editor for Breakwater Review and Concrete.

Friday--October 15-- Brookline Booksmith

Danielle Goncalves is currently a working writer pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her work has appeared in Juked Poetry, Front Range, Prick of the Spindle and Bloom. She writes both conventional and performance poetry and has featured at various venues in the Boston area.









Enamored from a young age by spaceships and quasars, but cursed with bookish inclinations and weak pectorals, Natty Bokenkamp was left to choose between careers in astrophysics and fiction writing. He attempted both, but ultimately found χ²'s and Δv's unsatisfying, dooming him (in the good ol' mythological sense) to the path of the MFA. His work has appeared in the journal ZYZZYVA, and he was awarded the 2007 Asimov's Magazine prize for Undergraduate Fiction. He is currently in his first year at UMass Boston







Nicholas Leonard is a poet and visual artist currently living and working in Cambridge, MA. He received his BFA in the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and is currently working towards his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Boston University. He has shown his visual artwork in galleries and festivals throughout the Northeast, and has work forthcoming in Stand magazine.








Laura Campagna was born and raised in Brookline, MA and spent many Friday nights as a nerdy teen haunting the halls of the Booksmith. She left for a long time and lived in Ohio, New York, Portland, OR, and San Francisco. She is happy to be back home, getting her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson, and living in a cozy cottage in Jamaica Plain with her wonderful partner and two hellion ginger cats.















Emily Thomas is currently working on her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Emerson College, where she also teaches classes in the first-year writing program and serves as the poetry editor for Redivider, a journal of new literature and art. When she is not teaching, tutoring, or editing, she is most likely reading or writing poems.

Friday --- September 17th --- Brookline Booksmith

Nicole Miller is a third-year MFA student in Fiction at Emerson College and holder of an Emerson Fellowship. Before Emerson, she lived in England for ten years. She completed Part I of the Tripos in English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge, an M.Phil in Victorian Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, and wrote her doctoral dissertation at University College, London, on technology in the works of Charles Dickens. While a student at Oxford, she published twice in The May Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. She currently works as a scholarly reader for the Oxford English Dictionary, and as a research assistant and writing tutor in the department of English at Harvard University. On September 17th, she will be reading an excerpt from her partially-drafted memoir. "A Broken Appointment" (a scene from her time at Oxford), won first prize for non-fiction at Emerson in 2010.






Molly McGuire lives in Boston, where she is pursuing an MFA at UMass. She's currently working on a series of poems about the works of Edvard Munch. She also reads 4 to 5 beauty magazines a month, which she told herself would be good research for a series of poems that blend Greek myth with the gender issues which permeate beauty magazines. She would like to stop, but the magazines won't stop coming.










Since running away to the circus has fallen from fashion, getting an MFA in Fiction at Emerson College was the natural choice for Lesley Moussette when she decided to change professional directions away from the film industry after discovering she really didn’t want to collaborate after all - at least with real people. The ones that slither up the pipes, sit on the sink and chit chat while she brushes her teeth are fine and often informative. Producing jewelry making instructional DVD’s, phone apps and anything else that will pay for her Chai Latte addiction keeps her busy in the off season when she lives in Santa Cruz, California with a dog that will never get the squirrel and a musically bent Senior Consulting Computer Geek.

Friday--- May 21, 7 PM --- Brookline Booksmith

Michele Harris received her B.A. in English Literature from Allegheny College, where she served as senior editor for the national undergraduate journal The Allegheny Review. She was awarded the Paul G. Zolbrod prize and received honors for her senior thesis, “Loosening the Knot.” Her work has appeared in The Rectangle, The Susquehanna Review, and Another Book. She is a second-year MFA student at UMass Boston, where she teaches for the OLLI program.

Linwood Rumney’s poetry has appeared in Superstition Review, Quercus Review, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. He teaches writing in Boston, where he received an MFA from Emerson College in May. He recently completed a stint as the poetry editor of Redivider and is the 2010 recipient of the fellowship in poetry from the Writers’ Room of Boston.

Matthew Salesses received his MFA from Emerson in December, where he is the retiring editor of Redivider. His fiction has or will soon appear in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get, was put out by Publishing Genius.

Friday--- April 16, 7 PM --- Brookline Booksmith

Wes Hazard doesn’t tend to put profiles of himself online. This is largely because he views the Net as a suspect proto-organism bent on assimilation, domination, and privacy-eradication. Then again, he did spend a tragic amount of time coming up with “deep” AIM quotes back in high school (Fight Club excerpts anyone?). As a second year poetry MFA at Emerson Wes enjoys words, thoughts, his evaporating humanity, and referring to himself in the third person when he can get away with it. He wishes you only the best, take care.

Gene Kwak is from Omaha, Nebraska. He is also an MFA student in Fiction at UMASS-Boston and the editor of the online synth-pop consortium, WE ARE CHAMPION, but that's neither here nor there.







Ian Singleton has published stories in Conte, Qarrtsiluni, and Dispatch. His translation of Die Flucht" by Rainer Maria Rilke appeared in Knock Magazine. He was born around Detroit, has lived in Alabama, and now lives in Boston. He studied at the University of Michigan and Emerson College. He teaches writing in a Massachusetts prison and reads for Ploughshares. He knows English, German, and Russian. For a day job, he is a librarian at Harvard University.

http://qarrtsiluni.com/2009/09/21/cuss-club/






Rad Thie is a first year poetry student at UMass Boston. He likes corduroy and burritos.

Friday--- March 19, 7 PM --- Brookline Booksmith

A 3rd year MFA candidate at UMass-Boston, Greg Stenta plans to graduate in May 2010. His work has appeared online in The Ledger Line Journal, and Prick of the Spindle. In print, it has appeared in paper wasp, and Nomad’s Choir, as well as Another Book. He often discusses matters of the heart in his poetry, and likes surrealism. In addition to being a full-time graduate student, Greg teaches creative writing as a primary instructor to undergraduates.

To Q—

I.

—We’ll moisten skin that never sees

day. You’ll overpower

my senses; I’ll come to

the small temple by your long tunnel—

II.

Your body under mine, bellies touching,

thoughts of another woman stir in me—:

in your painting, our hearts lay

together on a shelf, beating.

Jay Peters lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He studies poetry in Emerson College’s MFA program. He has taught writing to students at private high schools and inner city elementary schools in Providence. His work on Shakespeare has appeared in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, published by the PsyArt Foundation. He reads poetry for Redivider: A Journal of New Literature and Art, published by the Writing, Literature and Publishing department at Emerson College (visit their website here).

Cassie Condrey is finishing her final semester in an MFA in fiction at Emerson College, working on a collection of linked short stories under the guidance of Steve Yarbrough and Jessica Treadway. A Louisiana native, Cassie lives in Boston and is an instructor in Emerson's First Year Writing Program.