Friday, November 18th

7 pm at the Brookline Booksmith

Dariel Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba, where he lived until 1997. He's an MFA candidate in fiction at Boston University and teaches creative writing at the Boston Arts Academy. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Midway Journal, Versal, and The Acentos Review, among others. Dariel's prose was included in the book Tigertail, A South Florida Annual: Florida Flash, published in October of this year, and his poetry will be featured in Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems, made available by Accents Publishing this coming December. Currently, he is completing a collection of stories set in his native country, as well as a poetry chapbook.

Joelle Jameson is in her third year at Emerson College as an MFA candidate in poetry and is the sporadic host/producer of High Volumes, an online literary radio show (highvolumes.wordpress.com). She also writes theater reviews and teaches playwriting to high schoolers at EmersonWRITES. She writes poetry because poems are not required to be certain or true--plus short stories are just too long--and owes any and all poetic inclinations to Shel Silverstein.

Lauren von Hagel is a first-year fiction MFA student at UMass-Boston and graduated from Emerson College in 2008 with a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing. Lauren quit her job to focus on writing and now subsists entirely on dreams and stories, one of which she will now share with you.

Born and raised in northern California, Peter Picetti studied at The University of Montana, and is a first year MFA candidate in poetry at UMass. He lives in South Boston with his fiancée and cat.

Peter Jurmu is finishing at Emerson College and writes short bios. He has just finished a novella, which he enjoys sealing in manila envelopes.

Laura Goldstein is from Niceville, Florida. She finished a creative writing M.A. in August from the University of Southern Mississippi, and is now pursuing her M.F.A in poetry from Boston University.

Friday, October 21

7:00 pm, Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline

Wesley Rothman serves as an assistant poetry editor for Narrative magazine, reads for Ploughshares, and consults for Copper Canyon Press and Inter|rupture: A Journal of Poetry and Art. He tutors at Snowden International High School and teaches in the First Year Writing Program at Emerson College.

Lauren Picard, LP to most, is a third-year Fiction MFA student at Emerson College, where she also teaches composition in the First-Year Writing Program and creative writing in EmersonWRITES. Locally born and raised, LP briefly left Boston to attend Syracuse University and liked snowy Upstate so much that she spent two additional summers there doing Literacy Outreach for AmeriCorps. She's back in her old stomping ground now, but LP's time in Syracuse inspired and fuels her pending thesis.

Drew Arnold writes stories but wishes he could play the harmonica. Most of the most fun things he does are done in his imagination. Sometimes he tutors at 826 Boston, other times he tends to his dying basil plants. He believes we all have the ability to thrive.

Danielle Jones-Pruett is an MFA candidate at UMass Boston, where she also teaches creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, First Inkling, Southern Women's Review, and others. She was the winner of the 2011 Vella Poetry Prize.

Mike Brokos studied at the University of Maryland and studies at Boston University. He writes poems. Before you know it, he will be reading some of those poems for you. Holla!

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abriana Jette holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Hofstra University, and a B.A in English from SUNY New Paltz. She came to Boston late this summer to pursue an M.F.A in Poetry from Boston University. There she is a Betsey Leonard Fellow, and teaches at the Boston Academy of Arts.

Friday, September 16th

Bryan Coller grew up in Southern California, where he earned his

undergraduate degree in English from UC Irvine. He studies and teaches

creative writing as a graduate student at Boston University.

Meredith Jordan moved to Boston in 2009 to pursue an MFA in poetry at Emerson College. She was born and raised in Northern Virginia and attended the University of Virginia as an undergraduate. Although she misses the warmth and food of the south, she finds Boston’s city-life exhilarating. Her poetry is often narrative-driven, focusing on subjects like family, travel, and childhood.

Kurt Klopmeier is a poet beginning his second year in the MFA program at UMass - Boston. He recently received an honorable mention for the 2011 Harold Taylor Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Kurt is from St. Louis and enjoys reading, writing, the visual arts, and Minesweeper.

Molly McGillicuddy is pleased to accept this award for "Sexiest Man Alive" and finally stick it to George Clooney. When not posing for GQ shoots, she is working on her MFA in fiction at Emerson College in Boston and teaching first-year writing compostion there.

Natasha Hakimi holds both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2010,

the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction in 2010 and the Falling Leaves Award in 2010. Natasha's interned at Los Angeles Magazine and Truthdig, and continues to write for both publications. At the moment, she's pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry at Boston University.

Noreen Cleffi (not pictured) is a second-year MFA student at UMass Boston and started to write poetry, or some semblance of it, a year and a half ago--with a couple of exceptions. She was runner-up to Molly McGillicuddy in the sexiest man of the year contest, but bears her no grudge. Noreen considers writing poetry a dangerous occupation because while composing, she’s run red lights, jay walked, and just today, lost her wallet with all her i.d. and her flash drive, her most treasured possession. Oh, she supposes writing is dangerous for other reasons, like influencing one other person to write or come alive, but right now, she wants her flash drive!

May 20th, 2011 Reading

Lisa Battiston, as written by Alicia Churchill: Lisa Battiston is a rock star who also writes stories about love and sex and cigarettes that could be rock songs. She has literary tattoos, and a sexy voice, and lots of curly red hair. She recently finished her MFA in creative writing at Emerson, where the linked stories of her memoir-like adventures left her classmates dazed and inspired. She knows how to handle unreasonable requests for late night cell phone photography, and since we all need to work on that these days, you need to hear her stories.




Alicia Churchill is currently an MFA student in creative writing nonfiction at Emerson. She teaches art based research methods, creative process, and assessment of prior learning at Endicott College and freshman writing at Northern Essex Community College. She will be reading an excerpt from her memoir on how to break into ethnographic research as a toddler, which pastries taste best during a military coup, and how to smuggle art internationally by wrapping it in dirty laundry.




Angela Voras-Hills is an MFA candidate studying poetry at UMass-Boston, where she teaches creative writing. Her work has appeared in Breakwater Review, MARY, and Fox Cry Review. She has been awarded the Martha Collins Prize in Poetry and is currently Poetry Fellow at the Writers' Room of Boston.








Danielle Jones-Pruett is burned out on bios. But she loves to write poems, and read poems, and would really love to read you some poems. Thanks.

--April 15, 7PM - Brookline Booksmith--

Unless aliens descend from outer space and steal her thesis manuscript, Katie Vagnino will receive her MFA in poetry from Emerson College in just under two weeks. In addition to poems, Katie writes event and restaurant blurbs for the Time Out Boston website, witty posts for her blog (The Vagnino Monologues), and frenzied love letters that she rarely sends. She also teaches wide-eyed Emerson freshmen how to write and waits tables just down the street at Lineage. Her poems have appeared in The Furnace Review, Merge, nibble, nthWORD, The Raintown Review, The Road Less Taken, and Waterways and are hopefully forthcoming in a bunch of other places (maybe even some that you've heard of) soon. She lives in Allston with her muse, a fat diabetic calico cat named Maude.







Sarah Banse originally hails from southern Vermont but has been muddling through in the western suburbs of Boston with her four children for the past sixteen years. She is a recovering attorney who finally after finding fiction realizes why she hated the law so much. Namely, precedent; you can't say it unless someone has said it before you. She is an assistant editor at Ploughshares. Her work has recently been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, The Boston Globe and Errant Parent. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories entitled Self-Storage.







Originally from Malaysia, Crystal has lived in South Carolina, Texas, and Connecticut and is happy to be settled (for now) in Jamaica Plain with a husband, pet cat, and three roommates. She is in her second year in the MFA program at UMass Boston where she also teaches undergraduate creative writing. Next month, she and a team of fellow UMass grad students will be launching a new postcard literary journal called ripple(s) and attempting to break the world record for most postcards sent from a single location at one time.








Lisa Hiton is a poet at Boston University's MFA program. She loves the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Richard Siken, so if you aren't an emotional cutter, you probably will not enjoy this reading. Also if you are anti-semetic, you will probably not enjoy this reading. You don't know Lisa from Yale Younger Poets Award or the New Yorker but it's likely that you've run into her at Sweat and Soul Yoga or Eastern Standard. She will probably go there after this reading and drink multiple aviations. Lisa is from Chicago. She wants to be a filmmaker and poet, but for now, she just loves teaching her class at BU.







Sam Cha likes telling teh truth, but can't help embellishing. ALso, bios give him writer's block.















Elisabeth Houston lives in Cambridge. She graduated from Yale, where her coursework focused on a race, class, and gender. Currently an MFA student in poetry at Boston University, she is also a Cave Canem Fellow.

March 18, 2011

Gene Kwak is from Omaha, Nebraska. He is in the final year of his MFA Fiction Program at UMASS-Boston.














Jonathan Papas is an MFA candidate at UMass-Boston. His work has appeared in PANK, We Are Champion, Willow Springs, and others.


















T. J. McLemore grew up on a cattle ranch in Paris, Texas. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Baylor University in 2006, he spent four years living on community farms, touring with an indie rock band, and working as a ghostwriter and freelance editor. In his time away from the academy, he learned that a few of his favorite things in the world, in no particular order, are drinking bourbon, hunting, milking goats, and mountaineering, though he cautions against doing any two of these at the same time. He entered the MFA program at Boston University in the fall of 2010.
















Hairee Lee is finishing her final semester at Emerson College and working on her thesis which will be a collection of short stories. She has a bachelors degree in chemistry from the University of Toronto, has taught high school chemistry in London, and works as a freelance writer when she's not working as an office assistant at Emerson. Hairee enjoys karaoke, running, and drinking on her free time.













Born in Miami, Florida, in 1987, Charles A. Donate is the only son of Cuban immigrant
parents. He received his BA from Florida State University and is a current MFA student in creative writing at Boston University. Much of his writings are compelled by broad interests in the Cuban idiom, political philosophies and nostalgic memories cultivated by the voices of his family. Charles is a 2011 Robert Pinsky Fellow.















Think Jeremy Cort is natural?
Think again.
What is natural about animals released out of boxes? Or thought-dreams treated with toxic chemicals? Latex laced with viruses?
Vision production is intensely polluting, and the audience may suffer horribly at its confinement-- before such performers are killed by electrocution, strangling, stomping, or poison gas.
Please don't remain silent. It's better than you think.

February 18, 2011

Brooks Sterritt is from North Carolina. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Barrelhouse, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He maintains a website and diddled a doorknob. He is currently the fiction editor of Redivider.










Krysten Hill is a first-year MFA student at UMASS Boston from Kansas City, Missouri. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Stephens College where became involved in Women’s Studies and activism. Performance poetry is her first love and she enjoys rocking the mic at poetry slams. Her mother poets include: Audre Lorde, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Nikki Giovanni. Her greatest desire is to form a collective of badass women poets who travel around teaching the power of voice to the girls on front porches who wonder what that aching in their chests is all about.







Dan Kraines grew up in New Jersey. He has two brothers. He enjoys reading, art, and watching hockey.















Linda Sariahmed is a displaced Jersey girl who pines for the balmy breezes and particular funk of New Jersey and the New York metro area. In her final semester as an MFA candidate in poetry at Emerson College, she spends most of her time working, trying to figure out new hustles for when she graduates, and trying not to smack her head against her keyboard in despair as she reads things she wrote three years ago and tries to somehow make them thesis-worthy. She also likes to travel, though is usually too poor to do it; somehow, a lot of her poems seem to turn out to be about places anyway.





Katie Raddatz is pursing her MFA at UMass Boston in poetry. She is one of the coordinators of this reading series. She lives in Jamaica Plain, has two cats, loves horror movies and hates writing bios.













Laina Mullin Pruett was born and raised right here in Massachusetts, and has lived in 7 of the commonwealth's 351 towns. She is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Boston University and will graduate in September. She earned her BA at Emerson College, where she majored in Writing and Film. Currently, she teaches seventh grade Language Arts to 96 adolescents and is really looking forward to February vacation.

Friday--January 21-- Brookline Booksmith -- 7:00PM

Aaron Devine hails from Minnesota, and is a first-year fiction writer in the UMass-Boston MFA program. He’s the author of Wonder/Wander: 522 Days in Latin America, a literary scrapbook of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction prose, which tells the story of the people and places he knew while living and working in communities off the tourist trail from Nicaragua to Argentina. Aaron has volunteered with Grub Street and the City of Boston's Memoir Project, and teaches writing workshops at 826Boston. He's also a translator, juggler, and certified hospital clown.









Born in the South Central Coast of Vietnam, Binh Nguyen spent her childhood between the mountains of her father’s birthplace, and the sea, of her mother’s. At age nine, she immigrated to the U.S. with her family as a political refugee. Binh won a scholarship from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and attended Baylor University where she earned BAs in literature and philosophy. At the University of Washington, she earned an MA in literature, focusing on modernism, postmodernism, and cultural studies. Binh has studied poetry at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Italy, the Saison Poetry Library in England, and is currently pursuing an MFA at Boston University.











Wes Hazard is a poetry MFA candidate in his last semester at Emerson. He likes many different kinds of words and things but lately a lot of his work deals with technology or the million daily indignities brought on by inhabiting a human body. He appreciates your time and wishes you nothing but the best.




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 for excellence in English and received honors for her senior thesis, “Loosening the Knot.” Her work has appeared in The Rectangle, The Susquehanna Review, and Another Book. She teaches undergraduate creative writing at UMass Boston and is a third-year MFA student completing her thesis.




Calvin Olsen was born and raised in Meridian, Idaho. He received a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing (poetry) at Boston University. His work has been rejected by journals such as Poetry and AGNI, and is influenced by a seemingly infinite number of unconnected sources. However, despite its random content, much of his writing spawns from his experiences living abroad in Brazil and the UK and his love for water.

Jessica Rae Hahn is not the “Jessica Hahn” you’ll find on the internet. And she has never met Jim Bakker. Rather, she is a young writer who has just finished a stint as the nonfiction editor of Redivider. She loves David Bowie, Swedish Christmas foods, Gabriel García Márquez, baking French breads, ballet exercises, Tristan & Iseult, winters cold enough to chap your skin, Tivoli Gardens, anise-flavored candies, the Mapparium in Boston, heavy quilts, and Shaker cookbooks. What really gets her goat is when train conductors close doors on people. If you see her, say hello.