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.
