November 15th Reading

Next Friday at the Brookline Booksmith we're fortunate to have Anna Ziering, Eylsia Smith, Jennifer Murphy, Maggie Bohara, Ben Zuerlein, and Rachel Hezekiah. We hope to see you downstairs at 7:00!

A Boston-area native, Anna Ziering is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Boston University. She has spent the past six years in New York, where she studied poetry under Saskia Hamilton and Sean Singer at Barnard College and worked as a paralegal at the ACLU.

Maggie Bohara is a second year MFA candidate in fiction at Emerson College and a part-time ceramicist at Brookline's Feet of Clay Studio. When not writing or making pottery, she enjoys spending time with her

husband, two cats and dog.

Elysia Smith writes poems about things she doesn't understand--in an effort to understand them, of course. She's an avid people watcher who might possibly be described by fellow T passengers as creepy. However, it is this unabashed staring that has led her to some of her wildest poems and closest friends. Currently, she watches too much Frasier between helping organize the undergraduate Writer's Community at U-Mass and attending classes for her MFA. She will not buy you a beer but does apologize for making eye-contact with you while reading poems about sex.

Jennifer Murphy writes Fiction. Prior to earning her B.A. with a concentration in Creative Writing from Arizona Sate University, Murphy worked as a Camp Ranger for the AZ Girl Scout Council on Phoenix’s South Mountain Preserve for 10 years. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston and lives with her wife and two cats in a small apartment above a garage.   

Originally from Salem, MA, Rachel Hezekiah has been writing poems since she was scrawling Lady MacBeth’s soliloquy on her windows in dry-erase marker.  Now she’s working on the larger project of not writing poems about birch trees.  Her work has been published in Insanity’s Horse, Mixed Reader, Everyday Other Things, and anthologized  in Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out.

October Reading!

Our readers on October 18th are Leanne Hoppe, Mai Wang, Matt Socia, Dorian Fox, Ben Hurst, and Nathaniel Hunt. Additional bios will be added as they roll in. 

Dorian Fox grew up in Pittsburgh, but he has lived around the Boston area for a decade.  He was a finalist for Bellingham Review’s 2013 Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction, and his work has appeared online in Alimentum, Monkeybicycle, Prick of the Spindle, Bright Lights Film Journal, and others.  He recently earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Emerson College.

Nathaniel Hunt doesn't need your sympathy. He's doing okay. He's recently become an upwardly-mobile peasant through a combination of tutoring and freelance writing. He's had poems published, as one does, but finds it difficult to care about that most days. His hobbies include hating poetry and writing poetry.

Ben Hurst is a first-year MFA student at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He grew up on a tobacco farm in south Georgia, though he hasn't come to terms with whether he's a "Southern Poet." In the past few years, he has participated in a drinking contest with a Chinese university dean (it didn't end well), seen a hysterectomy in person (it went...okay), and driven up the coast of Malibu with his beautiful wife (as fantastic as it sounds). He's currently finishing up a chapbook titled Bird Impersonations, and he can easily bore you with bird facts on a long car ride.

Matt Socia is a second year MFA candidate in creative writing at Emerson College. His fiction has been published by CutBank and is forthcoming in Epiphany. He has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2013 Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston. He is originally from Traverse City, Michigan.

Leanne Hoppe is a current MFA candidate at BU in poetry and an Editorial Assistant at AGNI magazine. 

First Reading of the Fall!

We're back at the Brookline Booksmith this Friday, September 20th. As usual, the night begins at 7:00. Our readers this month will be Peter Picetti, Grant Bonnier, Sarah Handley, Paige Towers, and Donald Vincent. You can join our Facebook event by clicking here. Read on learn more about some of the talent that'll be center stage on Friday. 

Grant Bonnier is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is currently the fiction editor at Breakwater Review and is working on a collection of short stories entitled, “All the Pretty Things We Don’t Talk About.” He hopes to live long enough to see the zombies. His favorite authors include Raymond Carver, David Sedaris, and the Apostle Paul.

Sarah Handley left the mountains of West Virginia for Barnard College, where she studied medieval saints and Adrienne Rich’s poems. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Boston University. 

Paige Towers is completing her MFA in creative nonfiction writing at Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Spry Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in the Milo Review. She is also an instructor in the First Year Writing Program at Emerson, a reader for Ploughshares, a former ESL teacher, and a volunteer at Rosie's Place women's shelter in Roxbury, MA. Originally from Iowa City, IA, she completed her B.A. at The University of Iowa. In the past, Paige has interned at a human rights NGO in Dublin, studied abroad in London, volunteered in an orphanage and education program in Peru, taught English in South Korea, served hamburgers to cowboys in a restaurant in Colorado, and backpacked around a few continents. She and her adopted white German shepherd, Gorby, live in Roxbury, MA, where they spend their days writing, editing, reading and running.

Donald Vincent is from Washington, DC. His love for poetry transported him to Boston where he earned his MFA from Emerson College. When he's not saving the world as an Emergency Management Program Specialist with the Federal Emergency Management Agency serving the New England States or teaching Freshman Composition courses, he can most likely be found hosting his monthly poetry reading series titled: Mr. Hip Presents. Like himself, his series promotes poetry from some big names, spoken word from some awesome locals, and jazz and blues music features. His work can be found in a few places. He's not one for list so just ask.

Friday, June 21, 2013 at 7pm

Due to the lockdown in Boston on Friday, April 19th, April's reading has been rescheduled to take place this Friday, June 21st! Thanks so much to the Brookline Booksmith for opening their doors to us yet again, and for this final reading of the 2012-13 academic year. As always, we have a stellar lineup of writers ready to bring a little literary to your early summer's eve.

Please join us on Friday, June 21st, from 7 to 8:30pm, at the Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner (279 Harvard Street, Brookline).

Our readers will be:

Aaron Devine recently completed his MFA in fiction at UMass Boston, where he also teaches creative writing. His novella-in-progress Dakota Falls explores the aftermath of a kidnapping in a central Minnesota town. Aaron works as Writer in Residence at Boston Children's Hospital and co-founded the Write on the DOT reading series in Dorchester, where he lives. He loves to dance and wishes he did more of it.

Charlotte Seley recently completed her MFA in poetry at Emerson College where she served as the editor-in-chief of Redivider after having served as its poetry editor, and is a poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her work can be found in some journals, both online and in print, and in the pit of your heart, where all poetry comes from. Charlotte is originally from New York.

Theadora Siranian is an MFA Poetry candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has poetry published or forthcoming in elimae, DIAGRAM, Mason's Road, and Banango Street, among others. In 2007 she received the Academy of American Poets Prize from Emerson College, and in 2012 she was selected for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology series.

Tara Skurtu is a Teaching Fellow and MFA candidate at Boston University. She's a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow and a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold F. Taylor Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Review, The Dalhousie Review, minnesota review, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

Abby Travis is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Emerson College, where she teaches creative writing to high school students through emersonWRITES. By day, she works as an editorial assistant and senior reader at Ploughshares; by night she is at work on a nonfiction book project about how life hinges on the ways we communicate and miscommunicate, which focuses on training competitive sport horses. Regardless of where she is, Abby can usually be overheard making arguments for how everything—including Minnesota weather, Gilligan's Island, the Itsy-Bitsy Spider—can be related back to why Sisyphus is decidedly happy. "They Say," the essay Abby will be reading from, was recently named 1st runner up in Emerson's Graduate Writing Award in Nonfiction.

Are you on Facebook? Join the event here.

xxx

Friday, May 17, 7 PM

We are thrilled with the lineup we've got for the May edition of the Breakwater Reading Series, and we think you will be too! Join us this Friday, May 17th, 7 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner (279 Harvard Street, Brookline).

The readers will be:

Paula Simone Campbell is from Miami, Florida. She has written for the Miami Herald, and has been an editorial assistant to The Florida Review and AGNI. She worked at Broward College in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where she was a tutor to students learning English as a second language, and an adjunct professor, teaching Developmental Writing. She now teaches creative writing at the Boston Arts Academy. She is currently a Fiction MFA student at Boston University.

A Vermonter and Coloradan at heart, Liza Cochran now lives in Providence, RI, where she teaches eighth-grade English and leads free writing workshops for the greater Providence community. During the summers, she returns to the west to teach for the National Outdoor Leadership School and the Colorado Rocky Mountain School. She recently graduated from Emerson’s MFA program and was the recipient of the graduate fiction award. Next year, she will teach fiction to Emerson undergrads.

Patrick Connolly is in the poetry MFA program at Boston University. He is from Medford, Mass. He likes basketball and gardening.

When she was a little girl, Mariya Deykute liked to pretend she could escape to another world. Anything could be a doorway: the space between two trees, the edge of the garage roof, a mirror in the dark hallway. As time went on, writing seemed like the only way to stop the restlessness. But instead, she found those doorways between letters, right here. Words make terrific lovers, and maddening travel companions, because everything, in every world, is important, terrifying and hilarious — not necessarily in that order.

Amy Fant is an MFA student at Emerson College, where she also teaches in the First-Year Writing Program. You can find her work in a few journals if you look hard enough. She is originally from South Carolina.

Karen Locascio is a part-time temp, part-time tutor, and full-time MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Boston, where she also serves as a poetry editor for Breakwater Review. She is a reader for Salamander and once attended that writing conference spoofed by the Simpsons. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Amethyst Arsenic, Rufous City Review, The Holiday Cafe, and Spry. Karen loves New Jersey, coffee, and the number 3. She is currently in a co-dependent relationship with Jack Daniel; he finds her draining but enjoys being her muse.

Friday, April 19, 7 PM

Due to the lockdown of Boston last Friday, the April 19th Breakwater Reading was canceled. It has been rescheduled for June 21st, same place and time, so please join us then!


The April edition of the Breakwater Reading Series is almost here! Join us this Friday, April 19, 7–8:30 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline.

Our readers will be:

Paula Simone Campbell is from Miami, Florida. She has written for the Miami Herald, and has been an editorial assistant to The Florida Review and AGNI. She worked at Broward College in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where she was a tutor to students learning English as a second language, and an adjunct professor, teaching Developmental Writing. She now teaches creative writing at the Boston Arts Academy. She is currently a Fiction MFA student at Boston University.

Aaron Devine is completing an MFA in fiction at UMass Boston, where he also teaches creative writing. His novella-in-progress Dakota Falls explores the aftermath of a kidnapping in a central Minnesota town. Aaron works as Writer in Residence at Boston Children's Hospital and co-founded the Write on the DOT reading series in Dorchester, where he lives. He loves to dance and wishes he did more of it.

Charlotte Seley is an MFA candidate in poetry at Emerson College, a poetry reader for Ploughshares, and the editor-in-chief of Redivider, after having also served as its poetry editor. Her work can be found in some journals, both online and in print, and in the pit of your heart, where all poetry comes from. Charlotte is originally from New York.

Theadora Siranian is an MFA Poetry candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has poetry published or forthcoming in elimae, DIAGRAM, Mason’s Road, and Banango Street, among others. In 2007 she received the Academy of American Poets Prize from Emerson College, and in 2012 she was selected for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology series.

Tara Skurtu is a Teaching Fellow and MFA candidate at Boston University. She’s a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow and a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold F. Taylor Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Review, The Dalhousie Review, minnesota review, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

Friday, March 15th, 7 PM

I hope you are ready, because Breakwater Reading Series is coming for you! Our March reading will be this Friday, 7–8:30 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline.

Featuring the readers:

Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California Santa Barbara and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books) and is the author of the poetry chapbooks Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes Me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Guernica, Memorious, Rattle, Redivider, Upstairs at Duroc, and The California Journal of Poetics. She teaches poetry and drama at Boston University and Lesley University.

Jana-Lee Germaine is an MFA candidate in poetry at Emerson College, where she has won both an Academy of American Poets Prize and a WLP Graduate Writing Award. Her work has appeared in The Christian Century, and she has been a poetry reader for Ploughshares for the last four years. She is an avid runner and triathlete, which helps her in her other job as a homeschooling mother of four young children.

Once upon a time Lynn Holmgren was a fictional MFA candidate at UMass Boston. Now she is a real one, maybe. She is a co-organizer of the reading series Write on the Dot, where she has hosted the Insta-Poet Challenge, Metaphoria! and other original literary game-shows. Lynn has been living and writing in Dorchester since 2010.

Alyssa Mazzarella is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Boston, where she currently serves as a teaching assistant and the research assistant at the Labor Resource Center. When she's not reading and writing, she can be found drinking tea, tromping around the nearest forest, downhill skiing, eating burritos, or snuggling with her boyfriend in Roslindale. Originally from Connecticut, Alyssa earned a BFA in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in Common Ground and Freshwater.

Laina Mullin Pruett graduated from Boston University with her MFA in Fiction in September 2011.  Her story, “The Last Con”, appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The Gettysburg Review.  She is a 2011 Leslie Epstein Global Fellow and is an editor for The Worcester Review.

Lauren Jo Sypniewski is a recent graduate from Emerson College, obtaining her MFA in creative nonfiction in December 2012. She currently reads for Ploughshares, and teaches freshman writing at Emerson as well as creative writing to high schoolers through emersonWRITES. Originally from Michigan, Lauren Jo received her BA in English from the small liberal arts school Alma College. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The American Council for Polish Cultural Heritage, Discovering Arguments, and the Pine River Anthology.

Friday, February 15th, 7 PM

Persevering through the snow and ice, the February 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:

Cara Bayles is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Boston University, where she worked as a Teaching Fellow last semester. After majoring in Film Studies and English at Wesleyan University, she worked for five years as an award-winning journalist, covering the streets of Boston and the swamps of Louisiana. She was a finalist for the 2013 Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival Prize, and her fiction has appeared in Meridian and Trop Magazine.

Lewis Feuer is a first-year poet in UMass Boston’s MFA Program. Before coming to Boston, Lewis co-founded Portland's 12128, an alternative gallery and workspace constructed aboard the Labrador, a retired Bering Sea crab-fishing boat.  Lewis graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a BA in Studio Art, where he also received the Academy of American Poets Prize for his poem sequence I’ll Start this Way.

Betsy Gomez is an MFA candidate at UMass Boston. She received her BA in Literature and Writing from UC San Diego, where she also minored in Russian and Soviet Studies. She has taught creative writing to undergrads and elementary school students, served as a managing editor of Breakwater Review, interned at Consequence Magazine, advised potential study-abroad students, washed dishes competitively, and played countless weddings and parties as part of a string quintet. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, Monkeybicycle, 580 Split, and Plath Profiles. She was recently awarded a Mary Doyle Curran scholarship and an Emerging Writer fellowship in poetry from the Writer’s Room of Boston. Current obsessions include: Panera sandwiches, her dead Canadian boyfriend Glenn Gould, fashionable Korean pop idols, and Mary Gaitskill’s everything. She lives in Brighton, which means she’s probably stolen your seat on the green line.

Sarah Huener is a poet and musician from North Carolina, with a BA in English from UNC Chapel Hill. She is in the MFA program at Boston University, and reads for AGNI. She plays with the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra here in Boston. Sarah likes whiskey, bass lines, and line breaks.

Lauren K. Johnson is a second-year nonfiction MFA at Emerson College. In her previous life, she served as a military public affairs officer, deploying to Africa and Afghanistan, and winning regional and national military journalism awards. Her creative work, which revolves around her military experiences, has appeared in  20 Something Magazine, Mason's Road and the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, as well as her popular blog. Lauren's creative energy is fueled by Twizzlers and Cheetos.

Wesley Rothman serves as an assistant poetry editor for Narrative, senior poetry reader for Ploughshares, and a member of Salamander’s Board of Directors. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the 49^th Parallel, McCabe, and Consequence Poetry Prizes, his poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Bellingham Review, Salamander, Ruminate, Newcity, and The Critical Flame. He has worked at Copper Canyon Press and now teaches writing at Emerson College and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He appreciates David Bowie and Nina Simone.

Reading Friday, January 18th, 7 p.m.

Happy New Year! The first 2013 installment of the Breakwater Reading Series will be held this Friday the 18th, 7 PM – 8:30 PM, at the Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline.

Our readers will be:

Catherine Flora Con is an MFA candidate at Boston University. Prior to joining the fiction cohort, she was the office manager at Yamaha Music School of Boston, where she managed the lurid details of over 800 students and 14 teachers. She holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard and a B.M. in piano performance from the University of South Carolina.  Her essay, “Those Cons”, was published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2010.  It is now required reading for the course that she originally wrote it for.  

Adam Graaf is a first year poetry student at UMass Boston. Originally from Iowa, he received a BS in journalism from Iowa State University. Adam works in healthcare and leads a poetry workshop at Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk. He served nine years in the Army Reserve, deploying once, to Iraq, in 2003. Adam resides with the love of his life in Brighton, where the two of them live vicariously through other dog owners.

Adam Hanover is a second year poet in the Emerson College MFA Program. Originally from Buffalo, New York, he has an MA in English Literature, with a concentration in medieval poetry from The University at Buffalo. He also has more tattoos than publications, a detail that would be more pathetic if 20% of his skin weren't covered in ink.

Amanda Hartzell received her MFA from Emerson College. Twice a finalist for the New Writer Fiction award from Glimmer Train, she won the Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize from New Letters, where her work will appear in February.  She is a reader for Ploughshares and Redivider.  She keeps small notebooks and strange hours.

Calvin Hennick writes and teaches writing in Boston. He's working on a novel about Haitian Vodou, but you're probably only familiar with his work if you read lots and lots of news stories about road construction in Boston's western suburbs. It won't take much prodding for him to show you a video of his 20-month-old son singing "No Sleep Till Brooklyn."

Jillian Saucier teaches at the Boston Arts Academy and is a George Starbuck Fellow and MFA candidate at Boston University. She has read her poetry at Boston Architectural College, Massachusetts College of Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Phillips Exeter Academy, and in the Powow River Poets and the U35 reading series. 

We look forward to seeing you there!