Archive of Past Readings 2008--2012

FALL 2008



SEPT 2008

Irwin E. Thompson

Michael Mack

Kevin Gallagher



Oct. 2008

Denise Bergman

Elizabeth Kirchener

Kathleen Aguero


Nov. 2008

David Surette

Miriam Levine

Mike Ansara







WINTER/SPRING 2009


FEB. 2009


Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is author of Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. His work, both verse and prose, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Witness and other magazines. He has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, most recently a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in fiction, and The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Prize for the essay.

Bob Clawson

Bob Clawson is a writer, a fisherman, a cook.

His writing has great range: he’s been published in both The Southern Review and Yankee, in the Christian Science Monitor and The Lancet (the weekly British medical journal). He’s also been published in Beloit Poetry Journal and Poet Lore, among others.

Bob's chapbook, Nightbreak, published in 1997, achieved two additional press runs. He currently offers a collection of 15 poems on a professionally produced CD.

His formal education includes a two-room schoolhouse, Kenyon College, Harvard, and Yale. He has visited 32 of the United States, and has been abroad to France, The British Isles, Italy, Greece, Mexico, and to several island nations such as Jamaica, Cuba, and Nantucket.

Marguerite Bouvard

Marguerite Bouvard was for many years a professor of Political Science at Regis College and a director of poetry workshops. She is multidisciplinary and has published 15 books, numerous articles in the fields of political science, psychology, literature and poetry. Both her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized. She has received fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and from the Puffin Foundation. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Maryland and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony the Yaddo Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Leighton Artists’ colony at the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Marguerite’s activities as a Resident Scholar include organizing the first Tillie K. Lubin Symposium, as well as sponsoring lecture series on women and human rights and on environmental racism. Marguerite was also a founding editor of the All Sides of Ourselves publication series. She continues to organize panels for Women’s History Month and has had two collaborative exhibits at the Dreitzer Gallery and one at the gallery in the Women’ Studies Research Center.



MARCH 10, 2009.

Tom Daley

Tom Daley teaches poetry writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and poetry and memoir writing at Lexington (MA) Community Education. He is a member of the faculty of the Online School of Poetry and serves on the tutorial faculty of Walnut Hill School for the Arts. Tom's poetry has been published in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Del Sol Review, Diagram, 32 Poems, Salamander, Perihelion, and Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology. His manuscript, Shim, was a finalist for the Emily Dickinson First Book Prize and the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes. His poetry was nominated for inclusion in the anthology, The Best New Poets 2007. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize

Marilyn Jurich

Marilyn Jurich is Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University, Boston, where she teaches courses in Fantasy and Folklore, Speculative Literature, Children’s Literature and Modern English Poetry. In 1998 in her book Scheherazade’s Sisters: Trickster Heroines and Their Stories in World Literature (Greenwood Press), she established a new folklore type, the female trickster, called trickstar. Currently, she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with Joseph, her husband, and Joscelyn, their daughter. Her latest collection of poetry is: "Defying The Eye Chart"

Ellen Steinbaum

Ellen Steinbaum, a poet and journalist, has been a popular featured reader both nationally and throughout the Boston area. She writes a literary column for The Boston Globe and is also the author of a one-person play, CenterPiece, which she has performed. In her first book, Afterwords, she looked at loss, with poems about the illness and death of her husband. Her new book, Container Gardening speaks of what is perishable and what endures and what makes us who we are.



APRIL 2009

Lois Ames-- is a poet, biographer and
psychotherapist. She was a confidante of the poet Anne Sexton, and has
published many essays on both Sexton and Sylvia Plath including: “A
Biographical Note,” in Plath’s “Bell Jar,” She also was the editor of “Anne
Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters."


Daniel Tobin-- Daniel Tobin is the author of four books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005) and Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008). Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book Award.

His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad.


David Ferry--David Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1924. He completed his education at Amherst College and Harvard University, and served as a Sergeant in the United States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946. His books of poetry and translation include His Epistles of Horace: A Translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), The Odes of Horace: A Translation (1998), Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993), Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992), Strangers: A Book of Poems (1983), On the Way to the Island (1960), and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems (1959).

Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Ferry's other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College and a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.



Fall 2009



Sept 8 2009


Molly Lynn Watt

Molly Lynn Watt is a dyed-in-the-wool Cambridge, Mass. poet and writer. She is a founding member of Cambridge Co-Housing, a progressive educator for peace and justice, as well as the curator for the monthly Fireside Poetry Reading Series. She is the editor of the annual “Bagel Bard Anthology,” a yearly collection put out by a Somerville-based literary group “The Bagel Bards,” and she published a collection of poetry “Shadow People,” (Ibbetson Street) in 2007. Watt, and her husband Daniel Lynn Watt turned excerpts from Daniel’s parents’ letters to each other during the Spanish Civil War into a musical CD and performance piece.

Elizabeth Quinlan

Elizabeth Quinlan has been a member of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences for the past eleven years. She received a Honors in Creative Writing from U. Mass /Boston. She was a finalist for the Richards Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize. She is a visual artist, specializing in the Book Arts and has taught art for over thirty years to diverse communities, receiving grant from the Boston Foundation and Child Care Choices of Boston, as well as designed and run teacher trainings in the arts. She was a lead quilter for the Faith Quilt Project, founded by Clara Wainwright. Her recent work is a sculpture/book, Stories of the Grandmother, a collection of collages, found objects, photographs and stories.
Promise Supermarket, a collection of memoir poems, was published last summer by Ibbetson Street Press-- is the first of a three part series she is currently working on.



Edie Aronowitz Mueller

Edie Aronowitz Mueller traveled widely, living in Manhattan, San Francisco, Florida, and Israel, working as a secretary, photographer, potato/orange/peach-picker, dishwasher, and chicken egg collector. She has worked for a number of years as a lecturer at U/MASS Boston.

Widely published and translated, her poems have won numerous awards. The Fat Girl and Other Poems, her first book, was published earlier in 2008.


Oct 13, 2009



Matthew Lippman

Matthew Lippman's first book of poems, The New Year of Yellow, won the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize and is published by Sarabande Books. He teaches English Literature and Writing at Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Faye George

Faye George has published poetry in some of the most highly regarded national and international literary journals, including The Paris Review and Poetry, and Poetry’s commemorative collection The Poetry Anthology 1912-2002, selected from 90 years of that distinguished magazine. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals: Amicus, The Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, Sanctuary, and Yankee among them; and in such anthologies as Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry; Poetry To Make You Smile, 100 poems selected from over 250 years of British and American verse; The Four Way Reader #2; Orpheus and Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology; Poetry Comes Up Where It Can; Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, 1980. Her work has been profiled in The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal’s “Laureate’s Choice,” and by Poetry Daily, the online magazine, and included in their print anthology; also online by the Endicott Journal for Mythic Arts, and The Cultural Society.



She has published three poetry collections: the latest is Marchenhaft, like a fairy tale (Earthwinds Editons, 2008), Back Roads (Rock Village Publishing, 2003), and A Wound On Stone (2001 winner of the Perugia Press Prize). Her chapbooks Naming the Place: The Weymouth Poems and Only The Words appeared in 1996 and 1995. George is a recipient of the Arizona Poetry Society’s Memorial Award, the New England Poetry Club’s Gretchen Warren Award and Erika Mumford Prize. She lives in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.




CD Collins

With ever-shifting personae, CD Collins’ narratives and pyrotechnic poetics transport the listener from the hills of Kentucky, along the boulevard Champs-Elysees and to the urban landscape she now calls home.

Collins has performed in various Boston area venues including The Charles Playhouse, The Landsdowne Playhouse, and Club Passim, as well as appearing in poetry venues and academic settings along the East Coast, South and Midwest.

Ms. Collins' short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including StoryQuarterly, The Pennsylvania Review, Imagine, The South Dakota Review, Salamander and Phoebe. When accompanied by her band, Ms. Collins presents a captivating blend of Chamber Rock with Spoken Word that one reviewer described as “pure magic.”

Pincurl’s cassette Slow Burn was released in October 1997, followed by a compact disc, Kentucky Stories, released in March 1999 and funded by a grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. This disc won Best Spoken Word CD at the Boston Poetry Awards 2000.

Collins received two grants from the Somerville Arts Council — one in music, one in literature — and Cambridge Poetry Awards for Best Erotic Poem, Best Love Poem and Best Narrative Poem. The latter poem, “Promised Candy,” is included on her latest compact disc, Subtracting Down, a compilation of Post-Modern Mountain Storytelling & Song recorded with her band, Rockabetty. Also included on the CD is the track “Blood Orange,” which has been featured on the National Public Radio show “Here and Now.”

Five of CD’s poems — “The Fox, 1968,” “Promised Candy,” “Subtracting down,” “Self-Portrait with Severed Head,” and “Demimonde”—are included in the anthology The Boston Poet: Volume 1, Issue 1: Virgin Voyage.

Ms. Collins is an active member of The Writers’ Room of Boston.


Nov.10, 2009



Kim Triedman

Kim Triedman began writing poetry after writing fiction for a number of years. Though she only began submitting this past year, she was named a finalist for the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award and has had work accepted by the following publications: The Aurorean, The New Writer, Lalande Digital Art Press, Byline Magazine, Poet's Ink, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Journal, Asinine Poetry, Poetry Monthly, Current Accounts, IF Poetry Journal, Trespass Magazine, Great Kills Press, and Ghoti Magazine. Additionally, one of her recent poems was selected by John Ashbery to be included in the Ashbery Resource Center?s online catalogue, an annotated online catalogue of ARC's archive that serves as a comprehensive bibliography of both Ashbery's work and work by artists directly influenced by Ashbery. This poem has also been included in the John Cage Trust archives at Bard College. She is a graduate of Brown University and has attended numerous writing workshops in the Boston area. She was just named a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Prize.

Eric Hyett-- Eric Hyett's first collection of poetry, English Through Pictures was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His work has appeared in Salamander,The Harvard Advocate, and The Coin Flip Shuffle as well as online collections. Eric is a graduate of Harvard College, where he studied poetry with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido. A linguist, he is fluent in 6 languages, and has translated poetry (as well as written his own) in English, French, German and Japanese. He has just completed his second book: a collection entitled Failure To Appear.

Christina Davis- Christina Davis’ poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Jubilat, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New Republic, Pleiades, Paris Review and other publications. She is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship (selected by U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan) and residencies from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford, she is currently the curator of poetry at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University. She is currently completing her second collection of poems, Preludium.

Christina Davis’ poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Jubilat, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New Republic, Pleiades, Paris Review and other publications. She is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship (selected by U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan) and residencies from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford, she is currently the curator of poetry at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University. She is currently completing her second collection of poems, Preludium. She is the curator of the poetry room at the Lamont Library at Harvard University.



Feb. 2010


Dorian Brooks-- Dorian Brooks is an assistant editor at Ibbetson Street Press. A retired technical writer, she studies women's history and Native American history and volunteers for a couple of environmental organizations. Her new book of poems, The Wren's Cry, was published earlier this year.

Joanna Nealon-- Joanna Nealon is a blind woman, married, with three children and four grandchildren. She grew up in an old houseboat on Ash Creek in Bridgeport, CT., and now resides in a more conventional home in Newton, MA. As Joanna puts it, "Once upon a time" she received a B.A. in French literature and studied in Paris, France, on a Fulbright Scholarship. After that she was never heard of again, until in 1987 she began circulating her poems and reciting in the Boston area,mainly with the Stone Soup poetry group, founded by Jack Powers in 1971. She joined with other Stone Soup poets in various programs for social and cultural renewal, such as Boston's First Night,benefits for the homeless, and on-going readings at Bay State and Norfolk prisons. Joanna is also affiliated with Tapestry Of Voices, founded by Harris Gardner in 2000, with venues featuring well known and emerging poets. She has participated in readings at Border's Bookstore in Boston, Northeastern and Brown Universities,the John Greenleaf Whittier houses in Amesbury and Haverhill, the Warwick Museum Of Art, RI,and the annual National Poetry Month Festival held in the Boston Public Library. This year she is delighted to be part of the newly founded Brockton Library Poetry Series. Joanna has five published books: "The Lie And I", Stone Soup Press, Boston, MA (1990), "Poems Of The Zodiac",Cosmic Trend, North York, Ontario, CA (1992), "Said The Sage", New Spirit Press, Kew Gardens, NY (1993),"The Fourth Kingdom", Cosmic Trend, North York, Ontario, CA (1998), and "Living It" Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, MA (2004). Her poems have appeared in "Stone Soup Quarterly", "Stone Soup Gazette", "Cosmic Trend" anthologies, "Bitterroot", "Expression","The Aurorean", "Northeast Corridor" "Medaphors", "The Ibbetson Street Review", and the anthology, "We Speak For Peace".

Barbara Bialick--Barbara Bialick has an M.S. in Mass Communication from Boston University and a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan. She has published as a journalist in newspapers and magazines including The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Boston Phoenix, The Detroit News, Pittsburgh Magazine, New Age, McCalls, and Whole Life Times. She has published poetry in Lilith Magazine, Pemmican, Poetica Magazine, Jewish Currents, Ibbetson Street, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Bagel Bard Anthologies, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Tucumcari, The Somerville News, Eden Waters Press, Istanbul Literary Review, The Cherry Blossom Review, Fresh! Literary Magazine, Freestyle Vision, Pegasus and Boston Poet Journal. Her chapbook, Time Leaves, is published by Ibbetson Street Press, and can be purchased under Barbara Bialick at www.lulu.comm


March 2010

Bert Stern

Elizabeth Kirschner

Ellen Davis


April 13, 2010. Newton Free Library Annual Poetry Festival! 7PM Host--Doug Holder

Sam Cornish

Samuel James Cornish grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, but has lived in Boston for
much of his working life. He was a teacher at the Highland Park Community School in
Roxbury, and was also active in the “Poetry in the Schools” program in Boston and Cambridge.

In the early 1980s, he was the Literature Director of the Massachusetts Council on
the Arts and Humanities and a Creative Writing Instructor at Emerson College. Among
his many awards and achievements are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts
and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. The author of nine books of poetry and two
children’s books, he has been published in many periodicals, including Essence, Ploughshares,the Harvard Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. In 2007 he was chosen to be the first Poet Laureate of Boston.

Fred Marchant

Fred Marchant is the author of Tipping Point, which won the Washington Prize in poetry. He is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, and he is a teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.


Books by this author:

* Full Moon Boat
* Another World Instead
* Looking House



Kathleen Spivack

Kathleen Spivack is the author of The Break-Up Variations; The Beds We Lie In (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize); The Honeymoon; Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn; The Jane Poems; Flying Inland; Robert Lowell, A Personal Memoir; and a novel, Unspeakable Things (the latter two are currently with an agent). Published in over 300 magazines and anthologies, her work has also been translated into French. She reads her work throughout Europe and the United States, and gives theater performances and master classes. In Boston, Kathleen Spivack directs the Advanced Writing Workshop, an intensive coaching program for advanced writers. She is a permanent Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/ American Literature at the University of Paris, Sorbonne.
Posted by Doug at 4:55 PM Labels: Upcoming Readings Newton Free Library Poetry Series Doug Holder


Sept. 14, 2010


Coleen T. Houlihan-- Houlihan is a writer who studied at Wellesley College. She has featured in a variety of Massachusetts poetry events such as: Stone Soup, Best Sellers, Borders, the Sherman Cafe and Walden Poetry Series. Coleen has published her poetry in Main Street Rag (2010), Poesy, Bellowing Ark, Spare Change, The Alewife, The Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street Press, Spoonful: A Gathering of Stone Soup Poets, MoJo! The Maps One Journal and even in a journal out of England.

Her poetry is sometimes sensual, dark, political and personal. It is always urgent. Coleen’s single poem chapbook This Human Heart will be published by Cervena Barva Press.


Tanya Contos--

Tanya Contos, is the author of the book The Tide Clock and Other Poems.

Throughout her first career as an international banker and her second as a consultant to cultural and academic institutions, Contos has written continuously, publishing poetry, short fiction, and magazine features. As a playwright, she has won several awards and commissions. Her passion for language is equaled only by her love for the sea. She has served as a flotilla staff officer in the US Coast Guard Auxiliary, specializing in lighthouse history. She divides her time between Boston and Cape Ann, where she is active in maritime preservation issues. Her son Alexander Henry is a classical guitarist and writer, and his mother’s most valued editor


Celia Gilbert--Celia Gilbert is the author of several books of poetry, including Bonfire (Alice James Books) and Queen of Darkness (Viking Press). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Southwest, and Grand Street. She is the winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize IX. The Poetry Society of America awarded her both an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award, and her work has been frequently anthologized. Celia Gilbert grew up in Washington D.C. She received a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Boston University and was Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Boston Phoenix. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.



Nov.9, 2010


Ruby Ruby Poltorak -- Published poet, storyteller, accomplished Yiddish instructor, on the Fireside Poetry Reading Series Board, and long time Newton resident.



January O'Neil--January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, December 2009). Her poems and articles have appeared in The MOM Egg, Crab Creek Review, Ouroboros Review, Drunken Boat, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, Literary Mama, Field, Seattle Review, and Cave Canem anthologies II and IV, among others. Underlife, is a finalist for ForWard Review Book of the Year Award, and the 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize. In 2009, January was awarded a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. She was featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s January/February 2010 Inspiration issue as one of their 12 debut poets. A Cave Canem fellow, she is a senior writer/editor at Babson College, runs a popular blog called Poet Mom, and lives with her two children in FEB 8, 2011



Michael Todd Steffen- Michael Todd Steffen is a winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award (2007). His work has appeared in the Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, Lyrical Somerville, Bagel Bards anthology, and other publications.
He received his MA in Renaissance studies from Sussex University in Brighton, England, and went on to live in France--writing, translating and teaching throughout the 90's. His first book of poetry, "Partner, Orchard, Day Moon" is forthcoming from the Cervena Barva Press. He is a political fundraiser and ESL educator currently living in Cambridge, Mass.



Myles Gordon --Myles Gordon is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Award honorable mention, and winner of the 2009 Helen Kay Chapbook Competition (Evening Street Press) for his chapbook, "Recite Every Day." He has published poems in several literary magazines including Poet Lore, The Worcester Review, The Chaminade Literary Review, California Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Anthology, The Evansville Review and many others. Myles worked for many years as a television producer and won four New England Emmy Awards for writing and producing. His documentary film, "Touching Lives: Portraits of Deaf-Blind People" debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts film series and has been screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater. He currently works as a humanities teacher at Boston Latin Academy in the Boston Public Schools.


Grey Held--Grey Held is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Grey has had poems included in various anthologies, including O Taste and See, Familiar, My Heart’s First Steps, Rough Places Plain, and The Art of Bicycling. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Antigonish Review, Brooklyn Review, Fox Cry Review, Potomac Review, Slipstream, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has taught art at Ohio State University and the Art Institute of Boston. He’s been Computer Programmer, International Marketing Manager, Research Director, and is currently Director of Client Services at Forrester Research in Cambridge. He and his wife, Leslie Held, a costume designer, live in Newton, MA.
Beverly, MA






Philiph Burnham, Jr.--Philip Burnham has published four books of poetry, two with Ibbetson Street Press. His poems have recently appeared in the Aurorean, Blue Unicorn, Deronda, Ibbetson Street, Lyric and The Seventh Quarry. He has also had a poem read by Garrison Kieler on the Writers' Almanac. he won the Gretchen Warren Award from the New England Poetry Club in 2010.


FEB 8, 2011



Michael Todd Steffen- Michael Todd Steffen is a winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award (2007). His work has appeared in the Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, Lyrical Somerville, Bagel Bards anthology, and other publications.
He received his MA in Renaissance studies from Sussex University in Brighton, England, and went on to live in France--writing, translating and teaching throughout the 90's. His first book of poetry, "Partner, Orchard, Day Moon" is forthcoming from the Cervena Barva Press. He is a political fundraiser and ESL educator currently living in Cambridge, Mass.



Myles Gordon --Myles Gordon is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Award honorable mention, and winner of the 2009 Helen Kay Chapbook Competition (Evening Street Press) for his chapbook, "Recite Every Day." He has published poems in several literary magazines including Poet Lore, The Worcester Review, The Chaminade Literary Review, California Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Anthology, The Evansville Review and many others. Myles worked for many years as a television producer and won four New England Emmy Awards for writing and producing. His documentary film, "Touching Lives: Portraits of Deaf-Blind People" debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts film series and has been screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater. He currently works as a humanities teacher at Boston Latin Academy in the Boston Public Schools.


Grey Held--Grey Held is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Grey has had poems included in various anthologies, including O Taste and See, Familiar, My Heart’s First Steps, Rough Places Plain, and The Art of Bicycling. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Antigonish Review, Brooklyn Review, Fox Cry Review, Potomac Review, Slipstream, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has taught art at Ohio State University and the Art Institute of Boston. He’s been Computer Programmer, International Marketing Manager, Research Director, and is currently Director of Client Services at Forrester Research in Cambridge. He and his wife, Leslie Held, a costume designer, live in Newton, MA.





MARCH 8, 2011


Kate Chadburn---Kate Chadbourne is a singer, storyteller, and poet whose performances combine traditional tales with music for voice, harp, flutes, and piano. She holds a Ph.D. in Celtic Languages and Literatures from Harvard where she teaches courses in Irish language and folklore – but the heart of her understanding of Irish folk tradition comes from encounters with singers, storytellers, and great talkers in Ireland.

She has been a “tradition bearer” in the Revels Salon series and in the Gaelic Roots Concert Series at Boston College. Her music was featured recently on NPR’s programs, “Cartalk” and “All Songs Considered,” and songs from her latest CD, The Irishy Girl, are played on Irish radio programs throughout the country. The Harp-Boat, a collection of poems about her father, a Maine lobsterman, won the Kulupi Press 2007 Sense of Place Chapbook Contest and was published in 2008. Whether she is singing, telling stories, teaching, or sharing a poem, she aims to leave her audiences moved, enlivened, and eager for their own adventures



Ruth Lepson--- Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music & has been collaborating with musicians in recent years & is also trying to write songs lately. She has 3 books of poetry, published by Alice James Books & blazeVOX, & she edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, pub by the University of Illinois. Her poems have been in Carve, Shampoo, EOAGH & lots of other mags. Recently she wrote an article about poets John Wieners & Gerrit Lansing for Jacket magazine. She used to organize poetry readings for Oxfam America.




Sept. 13, 2011


Kim Triedman---Kim Triedman began writing poetry after working in fiction for several years. In the past two years, she's been named winner of both the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition and the 2010 Ibbetson Street Poetry Award; finalist for the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award and the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship; and semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition and the 2008 Parthenon Prize for Fiction. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies here and abroad, She is a graduate of Brown University and lives in the Boston area with her husband and three daughters. Her first poetry collection -- "bathe in it or sleep" -- was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in October of 2008. She is the editor for "Poets For Haiti" anthology.

Barbara Helfgott Hyett--Poet, professor and public lecturer, Barbara Helfgott-Hyett has published four collections of poetry: In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (University of Pittsburgh Press: 1986), based on her interviews with U.S. GI's, was selected Booklist's "Editor's Choice." Her second collection, Natural Law (Northland Press, 1989) includes poems about the history of Atlantic City, and was the first in the Salt River poetry series. The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus (University of Illinois Press: 1992), an epic poem on the 1492 voyage of the Columbian expedition, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The Tracks We Leave: Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, (University of Illinois Press:1996). Her new collection, Rift, is just out from University of Arkansas Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines including The New Republic, The Nation, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Women's Review of Books, and in twenty-five anthologies. Recipient of two Massachusetts Artists Fellowships in Poetry, the New England Poetry Club's Gertrude Warren Prize, the Herman Melville Commemorative Poetry Prize, Fellowships at Yaddo, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and other grants and awards, she has taught English at Harvard, MIT, and Boston University where she won the Sproat Award For Excellence in Teaching. She is a co-founder of The Writer's Room of Boston, Inc, and Directs POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets, in Brookline, MA.

Gail Mazur--After nearly 13 years of apprenticing herself to poetry, during which she studied with Robert Lowell and immersed herself in the Boston/Cambridge literary scene, Mazur published her first collection, Nightfire (1978), at age 40. Other books include The Pose of Happiness (1986); They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001); and Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems (2006). Tess Taylor, interviewing Mazur for the Atlantic Monthly in 2006, described the work in Zeppo’s First Wife as “restless and canny, penned in the voice of a tough-minded, comic speaker who names the minute disconsolations of daily life and then urges herself to engage this named world more wholly or more deeply.”

A graduate of Smith College, Mazur has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Her work has been recognized with a Massachusetts Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Active in the Boston and Cambridge literary communities, Mazur has served as the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center, and as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.



Wendy Mnookin is a poet living in Newton, Massachusetts. She received her BA from Radcliffe College and her MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Her latest book, THE MOON MAKES ITS OWN PLEA was published by BOA Editions in 2008. Her other collections are WHAT HE TOOK, TO GET HERE, and GUENEVER SPEAKS.

Mnookin teaches poetry in the Writing Literature and Publishing Department at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit Boston writing center. Previously she has taught poetry at Boston College, to children in schools throughout the Boston area, and in workshops around the country.

Mnookin's poems have been published in journals, online publications, and anthologies. She received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and WHAT HE TOOK won the 2002 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club



Oct 2011



Oct. 11, 2011


Ruth Kramer Baden--Ruth Kramer Baden has been a 1950s married mother, a creator of a local chapter of the National Organization of Women, a journalist, a consultant on children for Wellesley College, and at age 50, she graduated law school! (She practiced elder law). Her first collection "East of the Moon" (Ibbetson Street) was voted a MUST READ by the Mass. Book Award.

Steve Ablon--
Steven Luria Ablon, MD, is an adult and child training and supervising analyst and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University Medical School. He is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award. Dr. Ablon just published his fourth collection of poetry Night Call, in which he explores the experience of doctors from schooling through training to practice. He has three previous collections of poetry: Tornado Weather, Flying Over Tasmania, and Blue Damsels. His poetry has been included in many literary magazines.

Ben Mazer-- Ben Mazer completed a doctoral dissertation for the Editorial Institute at Boston University, edited Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 by Landis Everson (Graywolf Press, 2006), and was the first winner of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, and has written several full length collections of poetry.


Nov. 8, 2011


Allen West--Allen West, born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1930, came to the U.S. with his family after the 1941 invasion of Greece by Germany. Educated at Philips Academy and Princeton University, he served three years in the U.S. Army and received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cornell University in 1960. He taught at Williams College and Lawrence University until 1994, when he and his wife Emily moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he was a tutor at Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School and a volunteer at Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. His wife died in 1999; he has three children and three grandchildren. His latest collection is "Beirut Again" (Off the Grid Press)

He began writing poetry in 1983. A runner-up for the 1992 Grolier Poetry Prize and winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press's 2000 chapbook competition ("The Time of Ripe Figs," published 2002), his poems have appeared in many journals including Passager, the Comstock Review, Concrete Wolf, RHINO, and Salamander. A long-time member of The Workshop for Publishing Poets in Brookline, Massachusetts, he credits his continued development to its director, Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Since 2007 he has lived in Lexington Massachusetts.
Please direct comments and inquiries to offthegridpress@gmail.com.

Linda Larson--
Linda Larson was born and educated in the Midwest and spent childhood vacations and more than a decade of her adult life in Madison County, Mississippi. While in Mississippi, she worked as a feature writer for The Capitol Reporter and The Jackson Advocate. Larson relocated to the Boston/ Cambridge area where she has lived and worked for the past twenty years.

For five years she served as editor of and contributor to Spare Change News, a homeless newspaper based in Cambridge.

Over the years Larson has struggled with mental illness, homelessness and alcohol addiction.
She has been recognized by both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature for her advocacy work on behalf of people with mental illnesses.

As Larson’s life has become more manageable, she has been able to realize her long-term goal in putting together a collection of poetry, Washing the Stones, published by Ibbetson Press, August, 2007. These poems go a long way towards recapturing her promise as a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in the Seventies and as a teaching fellow in the creative writing doctoral program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Her new work in progress is tentatively entitled Hard Rain Falling



Freddy Frankel--

Frankel is the author of “Wrestling Angels” (Ibbetson Street Press). In a former life as Fred H. Frankel, he served as the Director of Acute Psychiatric Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and from 1985 to 1997, Chief of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital/BIDMC.



Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/136186/#ixzz1Z47s6eYu




Feb. 14, 2012

Alan Albert--Alan Albert’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Mississippi Review, and Poetry East. An audio recording of his poem on divorce, “Coats,” recently appeared in the online journal, The Cortland Review. He has been a finalist and semi-finalist in the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship program, and has been First Prize winner in the Annual Boston University Alumni Poetry Competition and the Worcester County Poetry Association Competition. In 2010 he was awarded an Artist Residency Grant at The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Alan has given many readings in the Boston area, and currently has a book-length manuscript circulating, entitled The Above-Average Tree.

Sandra Kohler--- Sandra Kohler--- Sandra Kohler's third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word
Press) appeared in May, 2011. Her first book of poems, The Country of
Women, was published in July, 1995 by Calyx Books. A second collection,
The Ceremonies of Longing, was the winner of the 2002 Associated Writing
Programs Award Series in Poetry, and was published by the University of
Pittsburgh Press in November, 2003. Her poems have appeared in journals
including The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Beloit
Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and The
Colorado Review, over the past 35 years. In 1985 and again in 1990, she
was the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry awarded
by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is a participant in the
Handprint Identity Project, a collaboration between artists and poets,
which had its opening exhibit at Elizabethtown College in November,
2008. She has taught literature and writing in venues ranging from
elementary school to university. A resident of Pennsylvania for most of
her adult life, she’s recently moved to Boston.

Judith Steinbergh---
Judith Steinbergh, poet, scholar and teacher, has taught poetry to students of all ages throughout Eastern Massachusetts over the past forty years. Her mentor/teachers include X.J.Kennedy, Ruth Whitman, Ottone Riccio, Kathleen Spivack and Elizabeth McKim. She published a book of poems for children, Marshmallow Worlds (with Cary Wolinsky); four books of poems for adults: Lillian Bloom: A Separation; Motherwriter; A Living Anytime; and most recently, Writing My Will; occasional short stories and essays; three textbooks: Beyond Words; Writing Poems with Children (co-authored with Elizabeth McKim); Reading and Writing Poetry, Grades K-4 (Scholastic Books); and Reading and Writing Poetry with Teenagers (co-authored with Fredric Lown). She won a Wordworks Prize and was a finalist for AWP and Brittingham competitions. Judith continues to teach writing and literature in several Brookline and Newton Public Schools and is a master teacher for Troubadour, Literacy through Writing and Song. As a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, Judith pursued her research: “A Developmental Approach to Teaching Poetry,” with articles published in the Harvard Educational Review and Language Arts Journal.



March 13, 2012


Jade Sylvan--Jade received her BA in 2006 from Indiana University’s renowned Department of Religious Studies. She is a poet, songwriter, and blogger who recently completed two independent tours of the country following the release of her first collection of poetry, The Spark Singer, by NYC’s Spuyten Duyvil Press in fall of 2009.

She has performed her work and facilitated writing workshops at some of the most respected spoken word venues and universities in the country, including The Boston Poetry Slam, The Berkeley Poetry Slam, The Green Mill (Chicago), The Nuyorican Poets Cafe (NYC), The Bowery Poetry Club (NYC), Brandeis University, University of Cincinnati, and Emerson College, among many others.

Jade’s first album of original songs, “Blood and Sand” was released to critical acclaim by Boston’s Red Car Records in April 2011.





Margaret Young--- Grew up in Oberlin, Ohio and went to Yale, then helped found a traveling theater company with fellow graduates. Went for a master's at U.C. Davis, poetry and nonfiction, bioregionalism and food. She has taught writing at Allegheny, Oberlin, community colleges in Pittsburgh and California, plus spent many years in arts education at the preschool through high school levels. Her first poetry collection Willow from the Willow was published in 2002 by Cleveland State University.

Young is a poet and a professor at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Her latest book of poetry is Almond Town. She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and co-founded the Open Door Theatre Company.



Lawrence Kessenich won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. His poetry has been published in Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Cream City Review, Ibbetson Street, and other magazines. His chapbook Strange News was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008. Other chapbooks were a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and a finalist for the Spire Press Chapbook Contest. His current collection, Before Whose Glory, was a semi-finalist for the Off the Grid contest. His poem “Underground Jesus” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kessenich also read one of his essays on NPR’s This I Believe in 2010 and it appears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love. His play Ronnie’s Charger was produced in Colorado in September 2011.