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.
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April 10, 2012
Gloria Mindock---Gloria Mindock is editor and publisher of Cervena Barva Press and editor of the Istanbul Literary Review based in Turkey. She is the author of two chapbooks, Doppleganger (S. Press) and Oh Angel (U Soku Stampa) and three poetry collections, Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson St. Press, 2007), Nothing Divine Here and Whiteness of Bone, forthcoming . Gloria has been published in numerous journals including UNU: Revista de Dultura and Citadela in Romania with translations by Flavia Cosma, Arabesques, Poesia, Phoebe, Poet Lore, Blackbox, River Styx, Bogg, Ibbetson St., and WHLR to name a few and numerous anthologies including Murmur of Voices by Cogito Publishing House in Romania. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was awarded a fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council. From 1984-1994, she edited the Boston Literary Review/BLuR and was co-founder of Theatre S & S. Press, Inc. Theatre S received grants from the Polaroid Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Globe Foundatioin, New England for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Somerville Arts Council. Gloria works as a Social Worker and freelances editing manuscripts and conduction workshops for writers. She moderates (part owner of one) two writing groups online based in the UK.
Ifeanyi Menkiti--Ifeanyi Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria and first came to the United States to attend Pomona College from which he received his undergraduate degree. Later he went on to Columbia University and New York University for further studies. He received his Ph.D in Philosophy from Harvard University. He has taught Philosophy at Wellesley College for more than 30 years, and is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, the oldest poetry book store in the United States.
David Rivard--David Rivard was born in 1953 in Fall River, Massachusetts, and is the author of five books of poetry: Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1996 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque, winner of the 1987 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poems and essays appear in the American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and other magazines. In 2006, Rivard was awarded the Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, in recognition of both his writing and teaching. Among his other awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A former Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review, Rivard lives in Cambridge, with his wife and daughter, and teaches in the University of New Hampshire MFA Program in Writing.
Sept 11, 2012.
SUSAN N. BECKER--
Middleboro, MA resident, Susan Nisenbaum Becker, is a psychotherapist, poet, playwright and actor. A long-standing member of Omega Theatre in Boston, she has written and performed many original theatre pieces that have been produced locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. In Middleboro, she co-founded a community theater, Nemasket River Productions, and the annual Herring Run ArtsFest. Susan has been a featured reader at the Joiner Center at UMass Boston, Porter Square Books Reading Series, New Words Books Reading Series, Mouthful, the Middleborough Public Library, Calliope on Cape Cod, and Chapter and Verse. Her published poetry has appeared in Summer Home Review ll, Plainsongs, Phoebe, Salamander (2008, 2010), Comstock Review, Poetry East, Wilderness House Literary Review, Lumina, Consequence, and is forthcoming in Calyx, among others. She has recorded her work for the Talk Information Center’s radio program, Egad! It’s Poetry, streaming on-line at WTIC in Marshfield, MA to 70,000 listeners. She is a Local Massachusetts Cultural Council grant recipient on behalf of the ArtsFest, and has been a four time Leighton Studio Artist in residence at the Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. In 2009, Susan was awarded and held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, and in 2010, she was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Her work was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. Susan’s first book of poems, LITTLE ARCHETECTS OF TIME AND SPACE, was a finalist in the 2011 Off the Grid Book Contest
.
WENDY DREXLER--
Wendy Drexler is a poet living in Belmont, Massachusetts. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book-length collection, Western Motel, was published in April 2012 by WordTech Communications/Turning Point. Her chapbook, Gas Stations, Drive-ins, the Bright Motels, was published in 2007 by Pudding House and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, Meatpaper, The Comstock Review, Ibbetson Street, Mid-American Review, Nimrod (semi-finalist, 2006 Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize), Off the Coast, Peregrine, Poetry East, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and other journals, and in the anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. Her latest collection is Western Motel.
Mary Millner McCullough--
Mary Millner McCullough, cofounder of The Streetfeet Women, has toured as an actor and writer with the Streetfeet Women in the United States, Kenya, and China. McCullough's plays have also been produced by Our Place Theater Project of Roxbury, MA; the former Theater Cooperative of Somerville, MA, and her play "Sorry Don't Fix It" was selected for production from the ACTRoxbury Playwriting Workshops and produced at Roxbury Community College. McCullough's short stories and poems have appeared in literary journals in New England. She has a B.A. degree in Theatre Arts from Goddard College and a Masters of Arts in Writing from Northeastern Universtiy. McCullough lives in Somerville, MA and is a member of the 57 Readers and Writers of Brighton, MA and the Bagelbards of Somerville, MA.
October 9, 2012.
Dr. Bernard Horn
Professor
B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ph.D., University of Connecticut
Bernard Horn’s first book of poems, Our Daily Words, won the the Old Seventy Creek Press 2009 Poetry Prize and has been praised by Robert Pinsky, David Mamet, Alan Feldman, and Lawrence Kushner. Garrison Keillor recently selected one poem from Our Daily Words to read on his Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio. His poems and his translations of poems by Yehuda Amichai have appeared in The New Yorker, Moment Magazine, The Manhattan Review, The Mississippi Review and The Worcester Review. He has been a guest at Rosanna Warren’s Theory and Practice of Literary Translation Seminar at Boston University, speaking on “Issues of Allusion, Multiple Meaning, and Playfulness in Translating Yehuda Amichai’s Hebrew.” He is the author of Facing the Fires: Conversations with A.B. Yehoshua, the only book in English about Israel’s preeminent novelist. His articles on Yehoshua are forthcoming in Sefer Yehoshua (in Hebrew) and Sephardism: Spanish/Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination. He has also written critically about the Hebrew Bible and American literature and has recently completed his first play. He was awarded a Fulbright and five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B. S., Chemical Engineering) and the University of Connecticut (Ph. D., English), he is a professor of English at Framingham State University and has also taught at Haifa University in Israel and at the Radcliffe Seminars in Cambridge.
Elizabeth Lund--
sElizabeth is not just a poet, she’s a reviewer and a former journalist. Interviewing is in her blood.
In fact, you may have seen some of her poetry reviews, which regularly appear in The Christian Science Monitor. Elizabeth was a staff writer and editor for the Monitor for 13 years. During that time, she developed multimedia poetry projects, covered major events in the literary world, and profiled some of the nation’s best poets. For 10 years she also edited poetry for the paper’s literary section.
Journalism was a natural fit for Elizabeth, who knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. She earned her MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where she then taught writing for two years. She has since read and spoken at events from New Hampshire to Florida. A highlight of her literary career was reading as a Poet Among Us at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America.
Shelby Allen--
CRACK WILLOW: POEMS OF TRANSFORMATION, published by Cherry Grove Collections last year. Living Poets Society prize, Boston Herald prize, Robert Grimes "Good Earth" award
Playwright -- EMMA LAZARUS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Articles and essays in The New York Times and The Boston Globe
Poems in national literary magazines -- Sanctuary, Wild Earth, The Awakenings Review, White Pelican Review, Phoebe, Earth's Daughters, English Journal, and more
Nov. 13, 2012.
Lo Galluccio--
Lo Galluccio is a poet/prose-writer and vocal artist whose work has appeared in Litkicks.com, www.strangeroad.com, The Heat City Literary Review, Abramalin magazine, Night magazine, Home Anthology of Eden Waters Press, Lungfull magazine!, Wilderness House Literary Review and The Audience Review, among others. In 2008, Cervena Barva Press released her prose-poem memoir, Sarasota VII and she appeared in Heide Hatry’s collection, “Heads and Tales” on Charta Books. In the summer of 2009, Propaganda Press published another chapbook called, “Terrible Baubles” which is available at http://alt-current.com/. She has two vocal CDs on www.cdbaby.com: “Being Visited” and “Spell on You.” Her Italian website, http://logalluccio.atspace.com was designed by Sergio Manghina, a fan and music reviewer in Genoa. She’s been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in Poetry and read at The Somerville Arts Festival and St. Mark's Marathon Day Reading in NYC, among many other venues. Her first poetry chapbook "Hot Rain," along with "Sarasota VII" and "Terrible Baubles" are all available at The Grolier Bookstore in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA.
Grey Held--
Grey Held holds a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MFA from Temple University. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first book of poems, Two-Star General was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2012. His second book of poems Spilled Milk will be published by WordTech Press in 2013. His poem “Vending Machine” was set to music by Paul Carey and has been performed by a cappella groups all over the country. Through a prison outreach program he has led poetry writing workshops for prisoners in the Northeastern Correctional Center. He has been a Lecturer in Art and Design at Ohio State University, Computer Programmer, International Marketing Manager, Research Director, and is currently Director of Client Services at a research firm in Cambridge, MA. He and his wife live in Newton, Massachusetts where they have raised two sons.
Feb. 2013
IRENE
KORONAS--Irene Koronas is a graduate of mass college of art with a
degree in fine arts. her watercolor painting takes on a formal approach
with the use of the grid or in forming small squares that juctapose each
other. she has been working as an artist since the age of twelve, along
with writing poems at the same time as painting and that is still a
constant. Her poems are published in various small press journals and
she has five chap books with a book of poems being published during the
summer of 2007. She is the fiction editor of the Wilderness House
Literary Review.
NICOLE TEREZ DUTTON--Nicole Terez Dutton's work
has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Indiana Review, and
Salt Hill Journal. Nicole earned an MFA from Brown University and has
received the fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Load
Writers' Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She
is the winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for If One Of Us
Should Fall. Nicole currently lives in Boston and is a lecturer at
Boston University.
JAMES ARTHUR
James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Canada. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review.
He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace
Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House,
and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. Charms Against Lightning, his debut poetry collection, is available from Copper Canyon Press as a Lannan Literary Selection.
James is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
March 2013
RICHARD BROSTOFF--
Richard Brostoff is a psychiatrist and has
worked in the mental health field for over 25 years. He studied
literature at Bennington College and Brandeis, and medicine at Duke and
Harvard. His literary work has appeared in Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, Confrontation, Permafrost, Wisconsin Review, Magma (London), Verse Daily, and many other journals. His chapbook, Momentum,
was published by La Vita Poetica. In 2000, Brostoff was awarded the
grand prize at the AEI International Poetry Festival, and in 2003 was
editor’s choice for the Robert Penn Warren Award. He also received an
international publication award from the Atlanta Review and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Prize in 2010.
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.
APRIL 9, 2013
MARK PAWLAK----Mark Pawlak is the author of seven poetry collections and the editor of
six anthologies. His latest books are Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012) and Jefferson’s New Image Salon :
Mashups and Matchups (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). His work has been translated
into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has appeared widely in English in anthologies
such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines
New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World,
among many others. For more than 30 years Pawlak has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based
Hanging Loose, one of the oldest independent literary journals and presses in the country.
He supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at U Mass Boston, where he is
Director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge.
DOUG HOLDER-- Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, Mass. He is the arts/editor of The Somerville News, and teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College and Endicott College. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, Rattle, Toronto Quarterly, The Long Island Quarterly, the new renaissance, Cafe Review, and many others. His latest collection of poetry is The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel ( Cervena Barva Press)
Sept. 10, 2013
Kim Triedman " I've been a writer all my adult life, though I didn't really start writing creatively until I was nearly 40. Since then it's been all poetry and fiction. I have three books coming out in 2013 -- one novel and two poetry collections. My first full-length poetry collection, "Plum(b)," is to be released in early 2013 by Main Street Rag Press. My first novel, "The Other Room," is forthcoming from Owl Canyon Press in October 2013. My second poetry collection, "Hadestown," is due out in or around November from WordTech Communications.
My very first book -- "bathe in it or sleep" -- won the Main Street Rag Chapbook Award and was published in 2008. I have also either won or been shortlisted in numerous national competitions, including
Winner, 2010 Ibbetson Street Poetry Award
I am also the editor/creator of the anthology, "Poets for Haiti: An Anthology of Poetry and Art" (Yileen Press, 2011), a volume which grew out of a benefit event I co-organized and co-chaired involving numerous prominent Boston-area poets. I have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies here and abroad (Prairie Schooner, Women Arts Quarterly, Salamander, Main Street Rag, Atticus Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Albatross, Poetry International, Tupelo Press "Anthology of Erotic Poetry," etc).
I am a graduate of Brown University and am currently the managing editor of Ibbetson Street. I live with my husband and two dogs in the Boston area. "
Robin Stratton--Robin Stratton is a writing coach in the Boston area, director of The Newton Writers and Poets Center, editor of Boston Literary Magazine, and author of Dealing With Men, Interference from an Unwitting Species & Other Poems, and The Revision Process - A Guide for Those Weeks, Months or Years Between Your First Draft and Your Last. Her fiction has appeared in Word Riot, Poor Richard's Almanac(k), Antithesis Common, Chick Flicks, 63 Channels, Blink-Ink, Pig in a Poke, Shoots and Vines and many others. Of Zen and Men is her second novel.
Oct 8, 2013
Donna Johnson--Her poems and reviews have been published in Birmingham Poetry Review, Blue Unicorn, Café Review, Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Marco Polo, Perihelion, Tulane Review, Two Rivers Review, and others.
Her first full-length collection of poetry, Selvage, was released in February 2013 by Carnegie Mellon Press
Wendy Ranan--
Ranan is the author of the poetry collection " The Quiet Room." The book shows
the refinement of time spent studying the craft at The MacDowell Colony, The
Millay Colony, and The Graduate Writing Department of Boston University. Through
the support of fellowships and associations with known writers, Ranan's work
has culminated in a fine book that admirers call "poised, lyrical and musical."
Some poems in the collection have appeared in journals and reviews such as AGNI,
Crazyhorse, Cutbank, and Verse, to name a few. The voice of this collection
rolls off the tongue, murmurs landscapes of the heart and beaches of the mind.
The four sections move seamlessly through retrospection on relationships, psychology,
and reflections on a "dangerous contemporary world" with "careful vision" and
"sensual language."
Frances Donovan--Frances Donovan’s poetry has been published in
PIF Magazine,
Chronogram, The Writer,
Perimeter,
and is upcoming in Lyrical Somerville. She curated the Poetry@Prose
reading series in Arlington, Massachusetts and now lives very far away
in Chestnut Hill. You can find her online at
www.gardenofwords.com
Lawrence Kessenich
won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. His poetry has been
published in
Sewanee Review, Atlanta
Review, Poetry Ireland Review,
Ibbetson
Street and many
other magazines. His chapbook
Strange
News was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008. In 2012, his poem
“Underground Jesus” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His full-length book,
Before Whose Glory, was published by
FutureCycle Press in March 2013. Kessenich has also
published essays – one of which was featured on NPR’s This I Believe in 2010
and appears in the anthology
This I
Believe: On Love – and he has had plays produced in New York, Boston, and
Durango, Colorado.
Nov 12, 2013
Charles Coe is the author of two collections of poems published by
Leapfrog Press: “Picnic on the Moon” (1999) and “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my
Parents” (2013). An accomplished jazz vocalist, Coe is known for his powerful
readings and warm and compassionate voice. He is featured on numerous spoken
word CDs, including “Get Ready for Boston,” a collection of stories and songs
about Boston neighborhoods, and “One Side of the River,” an anthology of
Cambridge and Somerville poets.
In
“All Sins Forgiven,” Coe
writes as a way to understand his own mother and father, and to connect readers
with their own parents
.
Marge Piercy describes the collection as “at
once an extremely clear-sighted and unsentimental portrait of Coe’s mother and
father, and a book written with great tenderness. It’s rare we can come to see
our parents in themselves, and even rarer to see all their faults and yet
express love and understanding, as these poems do.”
“My Mother Cut My Hair”
begins: “As she stood behind me / dressed in motherhood’s ill-fitting robe / I
wonder what messages she read / in the hair that settled around her feet / like
snow fro
some private winter.”
Coe is a program officer for the
Massachusetts Cultural Council and a long-time activist with the National
Writers Union, a labor union of freelance writers. He lives in Boston.
Alexis Ivy is
from Boston. She is a student of Literature at Harvard Extension
School and works as a copywriter for a wallpaper manufacturer. She is a
member of Poem Works: The Workshop for Publishing Poets located in
Chestnut Hill. Her most recent poems have appeared in
Main Street Rag,
Off The Coast,
Spare Change News,
Common Ground Review,
Tar River Poetry,
The Santa Fe Literary Review, Eclipse, and
J Journal. Her first poetry collection entitled
Romance with Small-Time Crooks was published in early 2013 by BlazeVOX Books.
Dennis Daly was born in Salem Massachusetts. He graduated
from Boston College with a B.S. degree and earned a Master of Arts degree at
Northeastern University. At Northeastern he studied poetry under Samuel French
Morse.
For ten years Dennis worked for the General Electric
Company. He became a union activist and was elected into the leadership of the
9000 member Local 201 of the International Union of Electrical Workers. During
this period he published and edited The Union Activist and the North Shore Union
Leader. He also was the managing editor of the Electrical Union
News.
Dennis has been published in numerous magazines and small
poetry journals such as The Sou’wester, The Lyric, Boston Today Magazine,
Soundings East, Tendril, Poetry &, Dark Horse, Green House, Lyrical
Somerville, Muddy River Poetry Review, Istanbul Literary Review,Wilderness House
Literary Review, Bagels with the Bards #7, Lummox, Zig Zag Folios, Fresh Broth,
The Boston Poetry Magazine, Ibbetson Street #32 and he is included with two
other poets in a chapbook entitled 10 X 3, published by Northeastern University
Press. The editors of Ibbetson Street #32 nominated him for a Pushcart
Prize. Dennis reads his poems occasionally at Stone Soup Poetry in Cambridge
MA, In a Pig's Eye in Salem MA and the Walnut Street Coffee Cafe in Lynn MA and
has featured at a number of venues. He is a member of the Bagel Bards, a group
of poets and artists, who meet weekly in Somerville. He also regularly writes
literary reviews for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.
His
first book of poems, The Custom House, was published by Ibbetson Street Press in
June of 2012.
His translation of Sophocles' Ajax was published as a
paperback in July of 2012 by Wilderness House Press.
In addition Dennis
has published travel articles and many op-ed pieces in the Salem Evening News.
He is currently working on another book of poetry set in Salem
Massachusetts.
Dennis lives in Salem Massachusetts with his wife, Joanne.
They have four adult children.
Feb 11, 2013
Denise Bergman---Denise Bergman is the author of The Telling, at book-length poem (Červená Barva Press). Her book Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller's teacher (Cedar Hill Books), was translated into Braille and into a Talking Book.
Kenneth Lee-- Dr. Lee, who has worked as a pathologist since 1977 and at Brigham Women Hospital since 1994, shifted to a part-time schedule so he could devote more time to writing poetry. The decision paid off. In June 2012, he published
Sweet Spot, a book of 52 poems. The title, suggested by his editor, comes from his poem about playing baseball as a boy: “Once one came in fat and I connected, met it in the sweet spot, sent it a mile.”
Poet
Teisha Twomey is currently working on her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Teisha’s work has appeared in
Ibbetson Street , Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Metazen, Poetica and she recently was selected for publication for the upcoming
“Wasn’t That Special?” Anthology.
http://www.teishatwomey.blogspot.com/
Teisha Twomey---
March, 11 2014
Carla Schwartz-- Schwartz is both a poet and a lyricist. She has performed and read her
work in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in several journals, including Fulcrum, 05401,
Wordgathering, among others. Her book, Mother, One More
Thing is forthcoming with Turning Point Books. Carla is also a
professional writer with a doctoral degree.
Deborah Finkelstein --Deborah Finkelstein's plays have been part of festivals
around the U.S. including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts. In the Boston area, Deborah's poems have been published in Ibbetson Street, Lyrical Sommerville/Somerville News, Stoneham Sun, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Nor'easter. She is the contributing editor for the critically acclaimed anthology Like One: Poems for Boston.
Ellen Jane Powers---Ellen
Jane Powers is a Massachusetts native originally from the North Shore.
She earned her MFA from Goddard College in Vermont, where she studied
with poets Chase Twichell and Alfred Corn. Her work has appeared most
recently in Inspirit, The Comstock Review, Raving Dove, and The Deronda Review. Her full-length manuscript, Toward The Beloved, was a semi-finalist in a recent Perugia Press book contest.
Spring 2014
April 8, 2014
Regie Gibson---Poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator Regie Gibson has performed, taught, and lectured at schools, universities, theaters and various other venues on two continents and in seven countries. Most recently in Havana, Cuba. Regie and his work appear in the New Line Cinema film Love Jones, based largely on events in his life.
Dan Tobin--Daniel Tobin is the author of seven 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), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net(forthcoming, Four Way Books, 2014)
Frannie Lindsay’s newest volume of poetry, Our Vanishing has just been released from Red Hen Press. It was chosen as the winner of the 2012 Benjamin Saltman Award. Her other three titles are Mayweed (The Word Works, 2010); Lamb (Perugia Press, 2006); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). Her previous honors include the Washington Prize, the Perugia Prize, and the May Swenson Award. In 2008 she was chosen as the winner of The Missouri Review Prize in poetry. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, Field, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, and many others. It is forthcoming in the Best American Poetry of 2014. Frannie’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, A Writer’s Almanac, and Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also a classical pianist. Over the last twenty years, she has rescued seven greyhounds. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
FALL 2014
Sept. 16
Ben Berman--Ben Berman’s first book, Strange Borderlands (Able
Muse Press), was a finalist for the 2014 Massachusetts Book Award. He
has received numerous honors from the New England Poetry Club and
fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville Arts
Council. He teaches in the Boston area and is the Co-Poetry Editor at
Solstice Literary Journal.
Kathleen Aguero---In addition to After That (Tiger Bark Press), Kathleen Aguero’s poetry collections include Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth(Cervena Barva Press), Daughter Of(Cedar Hill Books), The Real Weather (Hanging Loose), and Thirsty Day (Alice James Books). .
She teaches the low-residency M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at
Pine Manor College and in Changing Lives through Literature, an
alternative sentencing program.
Susan Nisenbaum Becker's--- poetry has appeared in Calyx, Comstock Review, Consequence, Lumina, Phoebe, Plainsongs, Poetry East, Salamander, Wilderness House Literary Review and Slipstream, among others. She is the author of Little Architects of Time and Space.
Nov. 18
Lisa Rua-Ware works
as a technical writer in the software industry. She graduated from the
University of Massachusetts in Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in
English Literature and has earned a Master of Arts in English from
Simmons College. She currently resides in the Boston area.
Matthew Lippman--Matthew Lippman is the author of The New Year of Yellow,
winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize and published by Sarabande
Books (2007). He is the recipient of a Michener Poetry Fellowship and a
New York Fine Arts Grant. He teaches English and Creative Writing to
high school students at Beaver Country Day School in the greater Boston
area. His latest collection is American Chew.
Ralph Pennel---His writing has appeared in
Common Ground Review,
Ropes,
The Cape Rock,
Apercus Quarterly,
Open to Interpretation,
Ibbetson Street,
The Smoking Poet, Unbound Press,
Right Hand Pointing, Monologues From the Road, and various other journals in the U.S. and abroad.
Ralph teaches literature at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston,
Massachusetts Bentley College, and is the fiction editor for Midway Journal
(www.midwayjournal.com), an online literary journal publishing out of
St. Paul, Minnesota.
A World Less Perfect for Dying In, will be published by Cervana Barva Press in the fall of 2014.
March 10, 2014
Jason Tandon--
Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry including, Quality of Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt (Black Lawrence Press 2009), winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Columbia Poetry Review, Esquire, Poetry East, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. He teaches in the Arts & Sciences Writing Program at Boston University.
Dan Chiasson--Dan
Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. He is the author
of five books. His name is usually pronounced "chase-in." Chiasson was
born in Burlington, Vermont. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst
College, and from Harvard University, with a Ph.D in English, where he
was awarded the Whiting Foundation Award in the Humanities.
Maggie Dietz---is the author of
Perennial Fall
(University of Chicago Press), a book of poems, and co-editor of three
anthologies related to her longtime work on the Favorite Poem Project.
More recent poems appear in
Harvard Review,
Salamagundi,
Plougshares,
and elsewhere. She has taught undergraduate workshops at Boston
University and now teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
She is the director of the Favorite Poem Project.
Spring 2015
April 14, 2014
Richard Hoffman--Richard Hoffman is author of the
Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections,
Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and
Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his
Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. His new memoir,
Love & Fury, is just out from Beacon Press. He is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College.
Alan Feldman---
Alan Feldman's
A Sail to Great Island (2004)
won the Pollak Prize for Poetry from the University of Wisconsin.
The Happy Genius (1978)
won the annual George Elliston Book Award for the best collection
published by a small, U.S. non-profit press. His work has appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly, the
New Yorker, and
Kenyon Review, among many other magazines
X.J. Kennedy--
X.J. (Joseph) Kennedy has published six collections of verse: the
earliest is Nude Descending a Staircase (Doubleday, 1961; still in
print from Carnegie Mellon University Press); the latest, Dark Horses
(Johns Hopkins, 1992). He has also authored eighteen children's books and
several textbooks including An Introduction to Poetry, 8th edition,
with Dana Gioia (Longman, 2002)--
SEPT 8 2015
Ed Meek-- Ed Meek has published
poetry, short stories and articles in The Paris
Review, Yankee, The North American Review, The Boston Globe, etc. He
taught Creative Writing, Composition and American Literature at Curry
College, Austin Prep and elsewhere. He latest collection of poetry is
titled
Spy Pond ( Prolific Press)
Elizabeth McKim-- Elizabeth Gordon McKim is a poet, spoken word performance artist,
editor, and teacher of poetry for people of all ages. She is the author
of eight collections of poetry, and one teaching guide
Beyond Words
co-authored with Judith Steinbergh poet laureate of Brookline. Her
poems and essays have appeared in many magazines, reviews and journals
including Ploughshares, Poetry and Drum Voices. She is Poetry Editor of
the international journal
POIESIS
published in Toronto Canada. Her book of poetry The Red Thread was
published by Leapfrog Press edited by Marge Piercy and published by Ira
Wood.
Laurin Becker Macios-- Laurin Macios was born in Miami, Florida and raised just short of
everywhere (Florida, Germany, North Carolina, Colorado, and Holland).
She has her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New
Hampshire and is Program Director of
Mass Poetry.
She previously worked in publishing (Springer, Apress, & Pearson)
and taught writing courses at UNH. She lives in Boston with six plants
and one wicked awesome husband. Her publicatons can be perused at
laurinbeckermacios.com.
OCTOBER 13, 2015
Enzo Surin --
is a Haitian-born poet, writer, playwright, speaker,
advocate and the author of Higher Ground (Finishing Line Press,
2006),
a collection of poems for urban uplift, which was nominated for
the
Massachusetts Book Award.He has been nominated for a
Pushcart Cart Prize; he is the founder of the Central Square
Press, and a Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College.
Sebastian Lockwood-- Sebastian Lockwood is a Storyteller who specializes in the epics: The
Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, CAESAR: the man from Venus,
Beowulf, and… Monkey: A Journey to the West. Lockwood is now narrating a
series of audio books available at
Audible.com and
Amazon.com. He works as a traveling bard, teacher and audio book narrator.
Dianne Silvestri--
grew up in Indiana and holds a BS from Butler
University and an MD from Indiana University School of Medicine. She is
as an academic dermatologist. Recently she saw her lifelong soft spot
for poetry become her sweet spot, and joined Poem Works Workshop in
Boston. Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Earth's
Daughters, Evening Street Review, Steam Ticket, Pharos, and Boston
Literary Review.
Feb. 9, 2016
BIG TABLE PUBLISHING AUTHORS Host-- Robin Stratton /Publisher
Christopher Reilley--Christopher Reilley is the current poet laureate of Dedham, MA and founder of the Dedham Poet Society and a contributing editor of Acoustic Ink. He is the author of Grief Tattoos, and the upcoming One Night Stanza from Big Table publishing, his work has appeared in a wide variety of places, like Frog Croon, Word Salad, and Chaos Writers,
and in such anthologies as “Sanctuary,” “Silent Consciousness,” and
“Hot Summer Nights.” He is also the host of the Dedham version of 100
Thousand Poets for Change event in late September.
Jennifer Jean--
Jennifer Jean's debut poetry collection is The Fool(Big Table, 2013); her chapbooks include: The Archivist, and In the War. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in: Rattle, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, Waxwing, Solstice, Poets/Artists, North Dakota Quarterly, and
more. She teaches in Boston-area universities. Jennifer is on the
advisory board for the Mass Poetry Festival, and she's the
Administrative Editor at Talking/Writing Magazine.
Doug
Holder-- Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, and
the arts/editor of the The Somerville Times. Holder currently directs
the Newton Free Library Poetry Series. His latest book from Big Table
Publishing is the poetic memoir " Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Poseur--1974 to 1983. He teaches at Endicott College and Bunker Hill
Community College in Boston.
March 8. 2016
Eric Hyett-- Eric Hyett's first collection of poems,
English Through Pictures, was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His work has most recently appeared in the
Cincinnati Review, Hudson Review, A&U, Off The Coast, and
Salamander. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from Harvard College, where he studied poetry with Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney.
Margo Wizansky -- Her poems have
appeared in many journals, among them Poetry East, Lumina, Tar River
Review, Inkwell, Quarterly West, Potomac Review, and American Literary
Review, and in anthologies about Alzheimer’s, love, and cancer. She
edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, 2003,
and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains, 2006.
In 2008 she was awarded a
Writers@Work Poetry
Fellowship, and in 2010, the Patricia Dobler Prize from Carlow
University for study in Ireland with its MFA program.
Zvi Sesling
SPRING 2016
April 12, 2016
January O'Neil January Gill O'Neil is an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
She is the author of the poetry collections Underlife (CavanKerry,
Press 2009) and Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014). Prior to
teaching at Salem State, she was a senior writer/editor at Babson
College. Visit her blog at poetmom.blogspot.com. She recently won the Mass. Book Award for her poetry collection Misery Island.
Nicole Terez Dutton
Nicole earned an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships
from the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her
collection of poems, If One Of Us Should Fall, was selected as the
winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She lives in Somerville,
Massachusetts where she serves as the city’s inaugural poet laureate,
and she teaches in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.
Barbara Helfgott Hyett-- Helfgott
Hyett has taught English at the Teachers as Scholars program at
Harvard, MIT, Trinity College, and Boston University, where she won the
Sproat Award for Excellence in Teaching English. As a poet-in
the-schools, she has served over 200 communities and was
artist-in-residence at the MFA and the Fuller Art Museums. She is
currently the director of PoemWorks, the Workshop for Publishing Poets, in Brookline, MA, which was named “One of the Best Workshops in Boston” by theBoston Globe.
Pamela Gemme--- Pamela Gemme lives in Leicester Massachusetts. She has several online/print publications including
Contempoary American Voices and is working on her first book.
She writes with Barbara Helfgott Hyett, Susan M. Rooney and others.
Steve Albon---Steve Ablon has published four books of poems: Tornado Weather (Mellen
Press, 1993), Flying Over Tasmania (Fithian Press, 1997), Blue Damsels,
(Peter Randall Press, 2005), and Night Call (Plain View Press, 2011).
His work has appeared in many magazines. He is an adult and child
psychoanalyst and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at
Harvard University Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
E.M. Janik--E. M. Janik has recent work in
december, where she was a finalist for the 2015 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in
Visions International,
The New Mexico Humanities Review,
Soundings East, and
other publications. She works as a business development and
communications writer for an information technology and engineering
firm, and lives in New
Feb 14, 2017
Holly Guran-- is a recipient of a 2012 Massachusetts Cultural
Council finalist award and has been a presenter at the Massachusetts
Poetry Festival. She is the author of River of Bones (Iris Press), the chapbooks River Tracks (Poets Corner Press) and Mothers' Trails (Noctiluca Press), and her work has appeared in journals including Slipstream, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Hawai'i Pacific Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Borderlands, Worcester Review, Salamander, and Bryant Literary Review.
Kevin Gallagher--
Kevin Gallagher is a poet living in Boston, Massachusetts. His recent books are Looking for Lake Texcoco (Cy Gist) and Isolate Flecks (Cervena Barva), and Loom ( Mad Hat Press).
He is a founding editor of Compost magazine, and teaches at Boston University.
Danielle Jones-Pruett
holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Boston,
and is the assistant director of the Writers House at Merrimack College .
Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Southern Poetry Review, and
elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation
Writer’s Award, and a 2015 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist
Award.
April 2017
Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of Admit One: An
American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014),
White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006)
Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for
ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin
College. She is currently editor-at-large for
FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the
Oberlin College Press. In spring 2010, she served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University
Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc.
Her next poetry collection, Unfathoming, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. . She directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.
Miriam Levine--
Sept 19, 2017
Ben Berman --
Ben Berman’s first book, Strange Borderlands
(Able Muse Press, 2012), won the Peace Corps Award for Best Book of
Poetry and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Awards. His second
book is Figuring in the Figure, forthcoming from Able Muse
Press in 2017. He has received awards from the New England Poetry Club
and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville
Arts Council. He is the poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine and
teaches in the Boston area, where he lives with his wife and daughters.
Richard Waring---
Richard Waring’s poems have appeared in the Comstock Review, Chest, Sanctuary, Contact II, Dark Horse, the American Journal of Nursing,Mothering, Inward Springs, the Journal of the American Medical Association,and
other publications. Richard has a B.A. in English Literature from Drew
University and attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
at Naropa Institute, where he studied the poetry of William Carlos
Williams with Allen Ginsberg. From 1982 to 1988. He is a senior layout
artist for the New England Journal of Medicine. His latest collection is What Love Tells Me.
Clara Silverstein---
Clara Silverstein is the author of four books, a blogger about historic
recipes at heritagerecipebox.com, and a long-time writer in the Boston
area. She has taught at Grub Street, Inc., consulted with individual
writers, and worked with young adults as a tutor and at the Books of
Hope literacy empowerment program. From 2008 to 2017, she directed the
Chautauqua Writers' Center, which sponsors creative writing workshops
and author programs at the Chautauqua Institution.
Nov 14, 2017
Wendy Drexler--Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection,
Before There Was Before, was published in March by Iris Press. She is also the author of
Western Motel (Turning Point, 2012), and a chapbook,
Drive-ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007). Her poems have appeared in
Barrow
Street, Ibbetson Street, Nimrod, Off the Coast, Prairie Schooner,
Salamander, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Worcester
Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals. Her work has been featured on
Verse Daily,
WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and in numerous anthologies.
Margaret Young-- Margaret Young is the author of the poetry collection " Blight Summer" (Finishing Line Press).
Young grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. After graduating from Yale, she worked
in a traveling theater company before earning an M.A. in creative
writing at the University of California, Davis. She has taught and done
residencies in many settings, and earned an Individual Artist Grant
from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005. Her first poetry collection, Willow
from the Willow, was published by Cleveland State University Press in
2002. Her most recent collection, Almond Town, appeared with Bright Hill
Press in 2011. She teaches at Endicott College and was recently
appointed to the faculty of the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
Scott Ruescher-- Scott Ruescher won the 2013 Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel
and international culture from the New England Poetry Club for
“Looking for Lorca”—one of the eleven poems in his chapbook
Perfect Memory (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Some of the other poems have appeared in
Tower Journal,
Naugatuck River Review,
In My Bed,
Harvard Educational Review, and the
Larcom Review. His chapbook
Sidewalk Tectonics
was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Ruescher
coordinates the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education and teaches in the Boston University Prison Education
program
February 13, 2018 Reading
NEA and Pushcart Prize winning poet, translator and a founding editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky has published five poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including A Handful of Bees reprinted as a CMUP Classic Contemporary edition in 2008. Orlowsky and Jeff Friedman's translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish Poet Mieczslaw Jastrun was published by Dialogos in 2014. Her sixth poetry collection titled BAD HARVEST is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in fall of 2018.
Danielle Legros Georges is Boston’s Poet Laureate, a role in which she serves as an advocate for poetry, language, and the arts. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Maroon and The Dear Remote Nearness of You, the chapbook Letters from Congo, and is the editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems. Legros Georges is also the recipient of the Sheila Motton Book Prize, The Pen New England Discovery Award, and fellowships from the Boston Foundation, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches in the Joiner Institute’s Summer Writer’s Workshop, and as a Professor in the Creative Arts in Learning Division of Lesley University.
Kathleen Aguero’s most recent book of poetry is
After That (Tiger Bark Books). Her other poetry collections include
Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth, Daughter Of,
The Real Weather, and
Thirsty Day. She has also co-edited three volumes of multi-cultural literature for the University of Georgia Press (
A Gift of Tongues,
An Ear to the Ground, and
Daily Fare) and is consulting poetry editor of Solstice Literary Magazine. She teaches the low-residency M.F.A. program at Pine Manor College and in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program, and runs Creative Writing for Caregivers workshops in both academic and community settings.
APRIL 10, 2018 Poetry Festival
Bert Stern is
the Milligan Professor of English Emeritus at Wabash College. He taught
at the University of Thessaloniki from 1965-67 as Fulbright Professor
of English and at Peking University
as an exchange professor in 1984-5. Stern published a pioneer study of Wallace Stevens in 1965 (Wallace Stevens, Art of Uncertainty, University of Michigan). He has published two poetry collections, Silk & the Ragpicker’s Grandson (Red Dust, NYC, 1998) and Steerage (Ibbetson Street, Somerville, MA, 2008). His essays and poems have appeared in journals including Southern Review, Columbia Teacher’s College Record, Sewanee Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and more than a dozen anthologies.
Richard Hoffman--Richard Hoffman has published four volumes of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner
of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The
New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and
his new collection Noon until Night.
His other books include the memoirs Half
the House and Love & Fury,
and the story collection Interference and
Other Stories. He is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College in
Boston, and presently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University.
Mary Buchinger Bodwell-- Mary
Buchinger grew up on a farm in the thumb of Michigan and now lives in
Cambridge, Mass. with her husband and two sons, dog and two cats. She
holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from Boston University and is
Professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University in
Boston. Buchinger is co-President of the New England Poetry Club and
Cambridge Poetry Ambassador (2016)
OCT. 9, 2018
BILL DILL
It’s a sweat and a pleasure for Bill to craft poems after decades churning out prose as a professor and practitioner of management with colleges and businesses here and overseas, Norway to China.
RUTH MARGOLIN SILIN
Ruth Margolin Silin's work has appeared in Ibbetson Street. Hidden Oak, Main Street Rag, Avocet, Muddy River Poetry Review, and several anthologies. She recently chaired an intergenerational poetry session with students from Lasell College and retired poets from Lasell Village.
MARGERY HUTTER SILVER
Margery Hutter Silver worked as an editor for 18 years--first for the Atlantic Monthly and then as a free-lance editor for Boston book publishers. Her work has been published in Third Wednesday, Paper Nautilus, and Muddy River Poetry Review.
CAROL TASHJIAN
Carol Tashjian began writing poetry in 2010 on a retreat to Monhegan Island with artist friends. She has continued writing in poetry classes taught by Barbara Helfgott Hyett at Lasell Village in Auburndale, MA. Recent work has been published in the latest issue of Muddy River Poetry Review.\
TANYA LARKIN--Tanya Larkin is the author of two collections of poetry, My Scarlet Ways, winner of the 2011 Saturnalia Prize and Hothouse Orphan (Convulsive Editions.) She is the recipient of two artist fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She teaches first year writing ad poetry at Tufts University and also teaches poetry and fiction writing at a local jail. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
BEN CARSON---Benjamin D. Carson is a Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Red Fez, The Ampersand Review, Cactus Heart, Free Inquiry, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and the Charles River Journal.
SPRING 2019
APRIL 9, 2019
MARC GOLDFINGER-- Marc Goldfinger is the poetry editor and board member of the street newspaper "Spare Change News." Goldfinger's poetry has appeared wildy, and is the author of a number of collections. He is the co-editor of Spare Change News Poems:
An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness.
LEE VARON-- Her poetry has been published in various journals and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.In 2018, she co-edited an anthology with Marc Goldfinger—Spare Change News Poems:
An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness.In addition to poetry she also writes short stories, and in 2015 won the Briar Cliff Review Fiction Award for her story Until the World Brought me Again its Gold, its Vermillion, which focuses on the subject of human trafficking.
DAVID DANIEL--David Daniel’s Seven-Star Bird, won the Larry Levis Prize for the best first or second book of its year and is available from Graywolf Press. Many of the poems from his new manuscript, Ornaments & Other Assorted Love Songs, have been featured in The American Poetry Review, Connotation: An Online Artifact, and Memorius. Recent essays on both poetry and music have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies. He was Poetry Editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade,
ROBERT K. JOHNSON-- Robert K. Johnson, after earning graduate degrees at Cornell University and Denver University, was a Professor of English for many years, including at Suffolk University on Beacon Hill. Later, he was an editor for Ibbetson Street for over a dozen years. Many of his poems have appeared individually in a variety of magazines. Nine collections of his poetry have been published, the latest being Choir Of Day/New and Selected poems.
Sept 17, 2019
New England Poetry Club Reading
Linda Conte-- Linda Haviland Conte is the author of Slow As A Poem (Ibbetson Street Press). Her poems are included in the anthologies City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices and Out of the Blue Writers Unite. A graduate of Connecticut College, she is currently serving as Treasurer of New England Poetry Club.
Hilary Sallick-- Poet and educator Hilary Sallick teaches reading and writing to adult learners in Somerville and serves as vice-president of the New England Poetry Club.
Mary Bodwell-- Mary Buchinger, author of three collections of poetry, grew up on a farm in Michigan and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. She is President of the New England Poetry Club and teaches English and communication studies at MCPHS University in Boston.
FALL 2019
OCT 8, 2019
Denise Bergman's--
Three Hands None was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2019. A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea was published by West End Press in 2014. ... The Shape of the Keyhole will be published by Black Lawrence Press in December 2020.
Jason Tandon--
Jason Tandon is the author of four collections of poetry: The Actual World, Quality of Life, Wee Hour Martyrdom, and Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, winner of the 2006 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press.
Patricia Shepard--
Patricia Sheppard is a graduate of Yale College, the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and College of Law. Her latest collection of poetry is "If You Would Love Me"
Nov. 12
Music and Poetry
Jennifer Matthews--
Jennifer Matthews’ poetry has been published in Nepal by Pen Himalaya and locally by the Midway Journal, The Somerville Times, and others. Her songs have been released nationally and internationally and her photography has been used as covers for a number of Ibbetson Street Press poetry books and has been exhibited at The Middle East Restaurant, McLean Hospital to name a few...
Lo Galluccio--
Lo Galluccio is a singer, poet/prose-writer and vocal artist who recently graduated from Stonecoast's MFA program in creative writing. Her work has appeared in Litkicks.com, www.strangeroad.com and others. She is the former populist/poet of Cambridge, MA.
jojo Lazar-- is a Boston-based multimedia visual and performance artist known as “the burlesque poetess.” She is active in the nu-vaudeville world as the tenor ukulele player in circus band, “Walter Sickert & The Army of Broken Toys." She is a creative writing and zine-making workshop leader with a BA from Brandeis and an MFA in poetry from Lesley University.
FEB 11
Joyce Wilson--- Joyce Wilson, editor of
The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet since 1997, has taught English at Boston University and Suffolk University. A chapbook of twenty poems inspired by the Fore River Bridge,
The Need for a Bridge, was published with Finishing Line Press in March 2019. A full-length manuscript
Take and Receive appeared with Kelsay Books in May 2019.
Ravi Yelamanchili-- His writing has previously been published in the Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Somerville Times, Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, Muse India, and several other journals.
Sept. 2020
Rosie Rosenweig
Wyn Cooper
Frances Donovan
Nov. 2020
DeWitt Henry
Lawrence Kessenich
James Najarian
