Breakwater Reading Series

Friday, January 20th, 7 pm

2012-01-19T06:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Friday, November 18th

2011-11-17T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-13T19:00:00.001-07:00

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

2011-05-15T09:07:00.001-07:00

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--

2011-04-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

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

2011-02-14T12:18:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-17T18:21:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2010-11-14T15:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-01T05:28:00.000-08:00

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—

—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.

Friday--- Feb. 19, 7 PM --- Brookline Booksmith

2010-02-07T16:52:00.001-08:00

Kris Evans was born and raised in northern Michigan before moving to the Boston area more than a decade ago. She is currently at work on her first novel while pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work has been published in The Harvard Summer Review, and she was a second place finalist for the Astrea Lesbian Writer’s Award in 2008/9.

Teaser:
The door lurched open unleashing the first peel of antiseptic cleaning solutions hovering over the more lurid odors they were meant to cover. Nothing in the outside world smells like that: no trace of earth or air, of leaves or rain, the spongy scent of fish or water; just a thin, sharp line of chemical between me and the dank, pungent odors of the body.

Joleen Westerdale is a 3rd year MFA candidate at UMass/Boston and a librarian at Keene State College in Keene, NH. Her modes vary from the confessional, drawn from personal experiences and overheard conversations, to the environmental, focusing specifically on bees and colony collapse disorder. Her work has appeared in the online journal Hot Metal Bridge and in the anthology, Another Book.

Mary Kovaleski Byrnes is finishing her final semester in an MFA in poetry at Emerson College, where she is an instructor in the First Year Writing Program. Her work has appeared in the Minnetonka Review, Aubade, the Squaw Valley Review and the Boston Globe. Originally from Lancaster County, PA, she currently lives in Cambridge, MA. She can be found on the interwebs at www.marykovaleskibyrnes.com.

Shuchi Saraswat graduated in December from the MFA program at Emerson College, where she primarily worked on her first novel. Her work has most recently appeared in Quick Fiction and she is the fiction editor at Fringe, an online only literary magazine.

Friday, Jan 22. 7 PM Brookline Booksmith

2010-01-19T17:36:00.000-08:00

Jana-Lee Germaine Balish is a native of the Boston area. She is currently working toward her MFA in poetry at Emerson College. When she is not writing or studying, she spends her time chasing her three energetic young sons and preparing for the arrival of her fourth child, due in April.

Andrew Ladd graduated in December from the MFA program at Emerson College, after completing his 270-page thesis, a novel, under the guidance of Margot Livesey and Jessica Treadway. His short fiction has appeared in print in Apalachee Review, and he has also contributed to a number of Boston-area blogs, weeklies, and guidebooks. He currently teaches in Emerson's first-year writing program.

Shea 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, Breakwater, Soundings East and Hoi Polloi. He is a regular contributor to the online political journal Pemmican. His poetry has been featured as part of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s celebration of marriage equality in Massachusetts. Other work has been featured on WOMR 92.1 FM, Radio Provincetown and WERS 88.9 FM, Boston. He's working on his first spoken-word album.

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman is currently working on her MFA in Fiction at the University of Massachsetts, Boston. Her most recent work is forthcoming in Sycamore Review.

We've Moved!

2010-01-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all who have joined us at Porter Square Books for the past few years!

While we appreciate the time and effort PSB dedicated to ensuring the success of our readings, we've decided to move to Brookline Booksmith.

We hope you'll join us there every third Friday of the month at 7 pm:

January 22
February 19
March 19
April 16
May 21