Friday, November 16th, 7 PM

The November installment of the Breakwater Reading Series will be held this Friday, 7 PM – 8:30 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline.

Our readers will be:

The Breakwater coordinator from UMass Boston, Natty Forsythe is an audacious step into the unknown, but remains eminently practical. Constructed out of materials that could not have been imagined only thirty years ago, he is capable of reaching very high speeds in a relatively short time, and represents only known technology that can carry out practical interstellar flight. For brief periods he will be visible as a specular reflection moving across the surface of the Earth.

Nathaniel Hunt lives in Dorchester, where he is trying to avoid being the advance guard of a creeping gentrification. In this regard, his main saving grace is his poverty. Originally from Portland, Oregon, he moved to Boston to attend the MFA program in Poetry at UMass Boston. His favorite places in Boston include the Harborwalk, Truong Thinh Supermarket, the Public Gardens, and Cambridge.

Breakwater co-coordinator Laura Marris is an MFA candidate and Teaching Fellow at Boston University. Her poems have appeared in Miriam's Well and Freq.uenci.es. A poet and lyricist, her work has been read and performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, the Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Music New Haven, and on NPR as a winner of the Hillstead Museum's Connecticut Fresh Voices Contest.

Amber McBride is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry at Emerson College. She is currently interning at the Furious Flower Poetry Center in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She is also the poetry editor of WordsApart. In her spare time she enjoys decorating for Christmas in October (Nightmare Before Christmas style), drinking champagne, and laughing entirely too loud. Her favorite film is The Last Unicorn.

(Reading for real this time!) Laura Tetreault is a third-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Emerson College. She also teaches in Emerson's First-Year Writing Program, tutors, and works as an editorial assistant and research assistant. She is the recipient of an Emerson College Graduate Writing Award in poetry, and her work recently appeared in Interrobang Magazine. This year she will be working on her thesis, a nonfiction book that explores themes of belief and doubt in relation to contemporary secular culture and technological advances. She can usually be found researching fringe supernatural beliefs, neuroscience, philosophy, and sci-fi predictions that have become reality. Or she just chases whatever else happens to interest her at the moment and tries to figure out a way to wrangle it into her beast of a project.

Thomas Wisniewski, originally from Ann Arbor, lives in Cambridge and studies fiction at Boston University. Recent translations, essays, and reviews of his have appeared in World Literature Today, Gradiva, and Biography. He holds degrees in English, Italian, and Saxophone Performance from the University of Michigan, where he won the Avery Hopwood Award.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Friday, October 26th, 7 PM

The October entry in the Breakwater Reading Series will be held this Friday, 7 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Avenue, featuring these readers:

Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is an MFA candidate at Boston University. She was born in Colombia and grew up in New York City. A former attorney, she left the legal profession to study creative writing at Southern Connecticut State University. Luisa has received awards for her poetry and was nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Her poems appear in various national publications and have been included in the writing curricula at colleges and universities.

Sam Cha is a third year poet at UMass Boston. Before he was an MFA candidate, he studied at Williams, UVA, and Rutgers. He was the 2011 and 2012 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize at his school, and most recently was a finalist for the third annual Memorious Art Song Contest.

Joelle Jameson is almost finished with her MFA in poetry at Emerson College. Her thesis consists mostly of rhyming poems about B science movies, World War One, paintings, England and drinking. She also recently completed a full-length play adapted from "Twelfth Night" and set in the 1960s. She writes theater reviews and hosts an online poetry radio show when the mood takes her, and has the most fun on Saturday mornings teaching high schoolers to write short plays at EmersonWrites.

Alex Sladky is from Augusta, GA and holds a BA in Latin from Mount Holyoke College. She is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at UMass Boston.

Lucy Teitler is currently the Saul Bellow Fellow at Boston University, where she is getting her MFA. She is a member of the Obie-winning playwrights group Youngblood at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. She was a writer for the NBC television series "Quarterlife". She has a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University, where she was the recipient of the English Department prize for fiction her junior and senior years.

Sonja Vitow is a third-year MFA student studying fiction at Emerson College. Her work has appeared in recent issues of Gulf Coast, The Meadowland Review, and Safety Pin Review. She lives in Brighton with her husband, two cats and an indeterminate number of squirrels residing in the walls of their apartment.

Friday, September 21st, 7 PM

The first Breakwater Reading of the school year will be held this Friday, 7 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Avenue, featuring the following readers:

Drew Arnold is a fiction writer in the UMass-Boston MFA program. For those keeping track, his basil plants are doing better this year, thanks for asking. The thing that angers him most about this cruel, unfeeling world is when he misses readings by his favorite authors. He recently started a listserv announcing upcoming fiction readings in the Boston area, which you can sign up for by clicking here. (He doesn't plug often, but when he does, he plugs shamelessly).

Marija Deykute, also known as Morie and "that Russian", is a 2nd-year poetry student at UMass Boston, where she also teaches Creative Writing. In her spare time Marija eats pickled herring, wrestles bears and obsesses. Current obsessions include theater, tallships, and small overgrown lakes. If the whole poet thing doesn't work out, Marija plans to tree climb professionally.

Aaron Krol is an MFA candidate at Emerson College. He writes formal poems, poems about animals, very often both at once and just occasionally neither. His poetry can be found in the Carolina Quarterly, Lucid Rhythms, Ghost Ocean, and forthcoming in Measure, and he himself can often be found at Eureka Puzzles in Brookline, where he sells board games when he is not too busy playing them.

Sara Rivera is a writer and artist working on her MFA in Poetry at Boston University. Writing is her lifelong adventure, and she is grateful for this opportunity to collaborate with brilliant artists while generating music through language. Sara has come to Boston from the desert and mountains of New Mexico, and is currently influenced by the work of Seamus Heaney, James Dickey, Edward Abbey, Isabel Allende, and (always, above all else) J.R.R. Tolkien.

Nell Stevens is an MFA candidate in fiction at Boston University where she is a Marcia Trimble fellow. She holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick, a Frank Knox Fellowship in Arabic language from Harvard University and an MA in Victorian studies from the University of London. Her focus is on long fiction and she is currently working on her third novel.

Laura Tetreault is a third-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Emerson College. She also teaches in Emerson's First-Year Writing Program, tutors, and works as an editorial assistant and research assistant. This year she will be working on her thesis, a nonfiction book that explores themes of belief and doubt in a contemporary context. She is the recipient of an Emerson College Graduate Writing Award in poetry, and her work has recently appeared in Interrobang. She plans to read a mix of nonfiction and poetry.

Friday May 18th, 7 pm

Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Avenue

Katie Raddatz is a poet & fiction writer from Michigan now living in Boston. She is just a few weeks away from graduating with her MFA in poetry from UMass-Boston, and has poems in Haven and Breakwater Review.

Ricky Davis is a third-year MFA candidate at Emerson College, where he studies poetry. His favorite things include baby smiles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Minecraft, bears, meatballs and prose poems. His greatest fears/dislikes include rope bridges, Slender Man, line breaks, the B line and how often people use the word "literally" recently. He lives with his wife Shannon and his son Jasper in Waltham, Massachusetts, and he is generally a very happy person despite how his face looks most of the time.

Andra Hibbert is a queer writer pursuing an MFA in fiction at UMass-Boston. She grew up in northern Vermont and attended Williams College. She has worked as an editor for Breakwater Review and Concrete. If Marilynne Robinson, Neko Case, and Michael Ondaatje could have a storytelling baby, she would like to be that baby. Her work has appeared in Five Points and Weave. 

Sarah Martin Banse has an MFA in fiction from Emerson College. She is an Editorial Assistant and Senior Reader at Ploughshares. Her reviews and essays have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, The Boston Globe and Errant Parent. She is the winner of the Emerson College Award in Non-fiction. Her fiction has been awarded prizes by the Pen Women. She was named one of Boston's top MFA students by Kneerim and Williams Literary Agency. She lives with her four children in Wayland, MA.

Friday, April 20th, 7 pm

Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Coolidge Corner

Betsy Gomez received her BA in Literature and Writing from UC San Diego, where she also minored in Russian and Soviet Studies. Currently, she is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Boston. She has taught creative writing to first and fifth graders in an elementary school in Dorchester, served as a managing editor of The Breakwater Review, and is currently an intern at Consequence Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Monkeybicycle, 580 Split, and Plath Profiles. She lives in Brighton, which means she lives on the green line.

Casey Brown is a 2nd year MA Publishing and Writing student at Emerson College and recipient of a Graduate Dean’s Fellowship. Despite having moved to Boston from Texas, he was born in Cincinnati and has lived in Chicago, a suburb of London, and Fort Polk, LA. Casey has degrees in History from Texas A&M University and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He is also a pre-war army veteran. Casey decided to enroll at Emerson after he served as acting-Production Editor for CALLALOO. While there, he was responsible for getting five numbers of the quarterly journal published in just seven months. Casey will be reading an excerpt from his creative non-fiction collection-in-progress titled Drink for Being Stupid.

Charlotte Seley was born and raised near Poughkeepsie, New York but don't worry--she does not know Snooki. She completed her undergraduate degree at the New School and is working on her MFA in poetry at Emerson College. Charlotte is the current poetry editor and rising editor-in-chief of Redivider, a writing tutor and a cupcake princess. She has had poems in New Plains Review, InDigest Magazine, inter|rupture, and others. She has not won any awards, grants, fellowships, or contests and has not published any books but she can probably out-eat you in nachos.

Crystal Koe is so very close to having her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston. She has no idea what comes next. But until then, she's looking forward to her second first anniversary and the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem where she will be this Saturday with her literary magazine ripple(s): a postcard press. Visit at ripplesbypost.com.

Mike Brokos hails from the mid-Atlantic, growing up outside of Baltimore, earning an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Maryland, and living in the Washington, DC area for several years before coming to Boston to work on his MFA in Poetry.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abriana Jette holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Hofstra University. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Boston University. There she is a Betsey Leonard Fellow, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, and teaches at the Boston Academy of Arts.

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 writes for Los Angeles Magazine and Truthdig, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry, at Boston University.

Friday, March 16, 7pm

at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline

Rad Thie goes to UMass Boston. He is from Cincinnati.

Ben Lobpries has found a lot of ways to make money: teaching, bar tending, retail, food service. Acting and horticulture fit in there somewhere as well, but not writing. Writing don’t pay the bills yet (but it does help ensure his annual tax refund). He is about to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, which should look cute next to his BFA in Theatre Studies.

Jessica Moreland is a world traveler, a mother, and a hopeless bibliophile. She has run her own freelance writing, editing, and design business for the last seven years, and she will graduate with her MFA in Fiction from UMass-Boston this Spring. Her most recent adventures have included scuba-diving among the coral reefs of Oahu, getting lost in the crowded back roads of Shanghai, China, and hiking in a torrential downpour on the cliffs of Slieve League in Ireland. She is hard at work on a novel and a memoir.

Sarah Ehrich is a poet with a penchant for gardening and letting her friends write her bios. She is currently completing her MFA at Emerson College where she is also a faculty member and an administrator for the community outreach program emersonWRITES. When she is not reading, writing or collecting oral histories for the Cambridge Historical Society, you can find her dancing or riding her bike with no hands. After the reading you should challenge her to a dance-off. Seriously. Do it.

Lisa Hiton received her MFA in Poetry from Boston University last year. 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 Eastern Standard. She will probably go there after this reading and drink multiple aviations. Lisa teaches literature, writing, and yoga all over Boston. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Elephant Journal, and 491 Magazine, among others.

Calvin Olsenwas born and raised in Idaho, if you know where that is. He received a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He recently returned from a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship on the Iberian Peninsula, where he ran with the bulls and translated poetry by a dead guy you’ve never heard of. His work has been anthologized in Fire in the Pasture and he has also published poetry in The Honeyland Review, Inscape, and SWAMP. He currently works as a reader for Slate magazine and a Portuguese translator, neither of which keep him from watching March Madness at work.

February 17, 7 pm, Brookline Booksmith

279 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA

Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a current poetry MFA student at Boston University. Her poems have been published in Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale. She is the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris and is the author of two chapbooks, Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). She was recently named the recipient of the 2012 "Writer's Room in Boston" Fellowship in Poetry.

Tyler Smith is from Rochester, NY. He is a founding member of the extreme sport known as Vertical Planking. He currently lives in Boston and is finishing his MFA in poetry this Spring.

Have you ever gone to the website "I Write Like" (iwl.me)? Amy Lester has. Apparently, she writes like Stephen King. True story. She tested it four times, and each time the result was the same. So it must be true. Of course, she has no idea if this is true, having never read any King herself. Plus, subsequent tests reveal that she writes like J.D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace, and/or - to her surprise - a handful of science fiction writers. Feel free to judge for yourself...
(Oh. Amy is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Emerson College, which is approximately 1,000 miles away from her home in Wisconsin.)

Krysten Hill is a second-year poetry MFA student at UMass-Boston from Kansas City, Missouri. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Stephens College, where she became involved in Women’s Studies and activism. Her mother poets include: Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Patricia Smith. She believes that this “page vs. stage” argument is getting out of hand and thinks that a poem should live in whatever skin it feels good in. 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.

Aaron Devine is a 2nd year fiction student in the UMassBoston MFA program. He works as Writer in Residence at Children's Hospital and helps run the Write on the DOT reading series in Dorchester, where he lives.





Shubha Sunder grew up in Bangalore, India, and came to the United States in 2001. She earned her BA in physics from Bryn Mawr College, and has taught math and physics at the high school level. She is now an MFA student in fiction at Boston University, and a Teaching Fellow. Her short stories and poems have been published in Nimbus and The Drum Literary Magazine. She lives in Jamaica Plain.

Friday, January 20th, 7 pm

at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Avenue, Coolidge Corner

Abby Travis is a second-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Emerson College. She grew up riding horses in Minnesota and loves driving across the plains, so now as substitution she drives to New Hampshire on the weekends to ride. Otherwise, she is an editorial assistant and the senior nonfiction reader at Ploughshares, and also teaches creative writing through EmersonWrites. Her book reviews and essays have been published in The Rectangle, Rain Taxi, on the Ploughshares blog, and on Powell's Books' Review-a-Day. She is currently working on a collection of sometimes-lyric personal essays that explore the pathology of miscommunication. She'll likely read some combination of nonfiction and prose poetry.

Eric Sepenoski is from Orient, New York, a village located on the extreme eastern end of Long Island. He splits his year between farming on Long Island in the summer and studying and teaching writing in Boston during the winter. He is currently finishing his MFA in poetry at Emerson College.

Kelly Morse grew up in the small, high mountain desert towns of the Pacific Northwest, but has since drifted as far as Spain, South Africa and even the East Coast. Her work has appeared in PoetsArtists, Gumball Poetry and Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi, and amongst other po biz things she was a recipient of the Seven Devils Fellowship for Idaho writers. Kelly is currently working on a series that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between Eastern and Western cultures after teaching for two years in Vietnam.

Michele Harris was awarded the Paul G. Zolbrod prize and, more recently, the David A. Kennedy prize in the field of poetry. Her work has appeared in Anderbo, The Prose Poem Project, Eclectica, Escarp, Stirring, and elsewhere. Currently, she works at MIT and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches for the OLLI program.

Jeffrey Taylor currently works as Program Coordinator for the graduate department of molecular microbiology at Tufts Universtity School of Medicine. He's also an editor and writer at MIT in the office of the Vice President. He completed his mfa in poetry at Umass Boston. His most recent work can be seen in Blood Orange Review and Mayday Magazine. His books, 'don't put it in your mouth' and the forthcoming 'anatomy of a rooster' are available online at jeffrey-taylor.com or from the publisher, elik press.

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.