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.

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

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

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.