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!

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.