February 17, 7 pm, Brookline Booksmith

279 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA

Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a current poetry MFA student at Boston University. Her poems have been published in Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale. She is the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris and is the author of two chapbooks, Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). She was recently named the recipient of the 2012 "Writer's Room in Boston" Fellowship in Poetry.

Tyler Smith is from Rochester, NY. He is a founding member of the extreme sport known as Vertical Planking. He currently lives in Boston and is finishing his MFA in poetry this Spring.

Have you ever gone to the website "I Write Like" (iwl.me)? Amy Lester has. Apparently, she writes like Stephen King. True story. She tested it four times, and each time the result was the same. So it must be true. Of course, she has no idea if this is true, having never read any King herself. Plus, subsequent tests reveal that she writes like J.D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace, and/or - to her surprise - a handful of science fiction writers. Feel free to judge for yourself...
(Oh. Amy is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Emerson College, which is approximately 1,000 miles away from her home in Wisconsin.)

Krysten Hill is a second-year poetry MFA student at UMass-Boston from Kansas City, Missouri. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Stephens College, where she became involved in Women’s Studies and activism. Her mother poets include: Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Patricia Smith. She believes that this “page vs. stage” argument is getting out of hand and thinks that a poem should live in whatever skin it feels good in. 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.

Aaron Devine is a 2nd year fiction student in the UMassBoston MFA program. He works as Writer in Residence at Children's Hospital and helps run the Write on the DOT reading series in Dorchester, where he lives.





Shubha Sunder grew up in Bangalore, India, and came to the United States in 2001. She earned her BA in physics from Bryn Mawr College, and has taught math and physics at the high school level. She is now an MFA student in fiction at Boston University, and a Teaching Fellow. Her short stories and poems have been published in Nimbus and The Drum Literary Magazine. She lives in Jamaica Plain.

Friday, January 20th, 7 pm

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

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

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

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

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.