Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 7 PM, Porter Square Books
Jessica Bozek is the author of The Bodyfeel Lexicon (Switchback Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including Squint into the Sun (Dancing Girl Press, 2010). Recent poems appear in 751, Action, Yes, Artifice, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, horse less review, and Sixth Finch. Jessica teaches writing at Boston University and runs Small Animal Project, a reading series in Cambridge, MA.
Kathryn Burak has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches writing at Boston University. She is the co-author of Writing in the Works (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) has published fiction and poetry in Fiction, Missouri Review, Seventeen, Georgia Review and others. Her novel The Dress, an excerpt of which earned her the MCC award, will be published by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan in Spring 2012.
Preston Gralla is a journalist, author, and freelance writer, whose work has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Morning News. He has published 40 non-fiction books, primarily about technology, which have been translated into 20 languages. He has been an investigative journalist, editor of a chain of weekly newspapers, and editor of PC/Computing, a national glossy magazine about computers. He was awarded the Yudis Prize for Fiction from Union College. Under his editorship, PC/Computing was a finalist for General Excellence from the National Magazine Awards.
Cathy Jacobowitz was born in New York City and lives in Boston. Her writing has been published in Analecta Literary and Arts Journal and Santa Monica Review, which published an excerpt from her novel Melly Mockingbird.
Anna Ross‘s chapbook, Hawk Weather, won the 2008 New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press and the 2009 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, The New Republic, AGNI Online, Dogwood, and Barrow Street, and her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in both 2008 and 2009. She is a contributing poetry editor to Guernica, teaches in the Writing, Literature & Publishing program at Emerson College, and is a Visiting Poet at Stonehill College.
Friday, March 18, 2011, 7 PM, Grub Street
Jamie Cat Callan is the creator of The Writers Toolbox (Chronicle Books, 2007) and the author of French Women Don’t Sleep Alone (Citadel/Kensington, 2009). Most recently, she received a grant from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Auvillar, France where she wrote her latest book, Bonjour, Happiness! (Kensington/Citadel, 2011) Jamie is married to a Woods Hole Oceanographic climate change scientist. The story of how they met (he was a student in her creative writing class) and eventually married – appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column.
Cheryl Clark, author of the poetry chapbook Dead-Eye Spring (Cy Gist Press), is a poet, translator, and visual artist whose work often explores the junctures of these artforms. She grew up near Chicago and lives in Boston, where she teaches writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston University, and Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Her poems appeared in Third Coast, EOAGH, Inertia Magazine, Dispatx, Propeller Quarterly, and DIAGRAM, and her translations in the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her manuscript Walking Opposite a Parade has been a finalist for the 2009 and 2010 Colorado Prize for Poetry.
Adam Schwartz is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. His stories have been widely anthologized, and his first novel A Stranger on the Planet was published in January 2011. Previously, portions of that novel were published as stories in The New Yorker. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.
Ron Spalletta has an MFA in Poetry from Emerson College. His poem “Blank Villanelle” was selected for publication in Slate by former U.S poet laureate Robert Pinsky. The Harvard Gazette wrote a feature about Spalletta’s dual careers in poetry and science; he is a clerkship manager at Harvard Medical School.
Marc Velasquez has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. A Future Not Our Own, the creative nonfiction work that garnered Velasquez his MCC award, is based on his experiences directing youth education programs for The Kolbe Foundation, the only prison in the country of Belize. He is a staff writer and managing editor for the website ChamberFour.com.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011, 7 PM, Forbes Library
Rosann Kozlowski has published poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, Connecticut Review, MidWest Quarterly, Salamander, and the anthology Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics (Milkweed, 1998). She has been awarded numerous artist residencies, including the Isle of Cumbrae (Scotland), St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminar (Russia), Aubuterre Sur-Donne (France), and Hedgebrook. She received an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College/Norwich University.
Nancy K. Pearson is author of the poetry collection Two Minutes of Light (Perugia Press, 2008), and has had her poems published in many literary journals and magazines including The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her honors include winning the Perugia Press Prize, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Pearson grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and received her B.A. from University of Virginia and her M.F.A. from George Mason University.
Cynthia Morrison Phoel is the author of Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories. She holds degrees from Cornell University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and she is a previous recipient (2004) of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and Cerise Press. She lives near Boston with her husband and three children.
Jendi Reiter‘s first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and was published in 2009 by Amsterdam Press. Her poetry chapbook Barbie at 50 won the 2010 Cervena Barva Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published that year by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The New Criterion, Mudfish, Passages North, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, Cutthroat, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Phoebe, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications.
Jung Yun is a graduate of UMass Amherst’s M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Tin House, The Best of Tin House, and The Massachusetts Review, and she has also been recognized as a finalist in the Glimmertrain Short Fiction Contest and the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest. Jung received an Honorable Mention for the 2010 Pushcart Prize and a Delaney Fellowship for Women Writers in 2007. She currently resides in Montague with her husband, and is working on her first novel.
Thursday, March 31, 2011, 7 PM, Porter Square Books
John Canaday has published poems in New England Review, The Paris Review, Raritan, and Slate, among other journals and anthologies. His poetry collection The Invisible World (LSU Press, 2002) was chosen by Sherod Santos for the 2001 Walt Whitman Award. Other awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Playwriting, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, and the New Millennium Poetry Award. He is poetry editor for PoetryNet.org and is the author of the critical study The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs.
Sharon Howell‘s work has been published in Colorado Review, Diversity and Distinction Magazine, and Notre Dame Review. A forthcoming poetry collection has been accepted for publication by Pressed Wafer Press. She is the creator/director of Ramblebarrow, a bi-monthly podcast radio show about poetry. She has a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University, where she teaches.
Kathryn Kulpa is the author of Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press, 2005), winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award in short fiction. Her work has been published in Florida Review, Seventeen, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Monkeybicycle, decomP magazine and Metazen. Her awards and honors include the tnr/the new renaissance Louise E. Reynolds Memorial Fiction Awards, the Florida Review Editor’s Award, and a Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency. She is editor of the literary journal Newport Review and teaches at the University of Rhode Island.
Allan Reeder has been published in Memorious and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. A recipient of two MCC Artist Fellowships, he has been nominated as a Ploughshares “Emerging Writer” and received a Full Fellowship in Fiction from the Vermont Studio Center. In 2007, he was awarded the E.E. Ford Prize for Exceptional Merit by his peers at Walnut Hill School for the Arts, where he directs the Writing & Publishing Program and where he founded with his students The Blue Pencil Online, a literary magazine for young writers worldwide.
Julia Story‘s first collection, Post Moxie (Sarabande Books, 2010), was the recipient of Sarabande Books’ 2009 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and Ploughshares’ 2010 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and was named one of Coldfront‘s Top 30 Poetry Books of 2010. Her recent work has appeared in The Paris Review, Octopus, and Salt Hill. She is currently working on her next collection, tentatively titled Red Town. A native of Indiana, she now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011, 7 PM, Newtonville Books
Regie Gibson is a poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator who has performed, taught, and lectured on two continents and in seven countries. Regie and his work appear in the New Line Cinema film Love Jones, based largely on events in his life. He has been anthologized in Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Anthology (University of Michigan Press, 2008), and has been published in Alehouse Literary Journal, Black Renaissance Noire, Cave Canem Literary Journal, Harvard Divinity Magazine, Iowa Review, and Poetry. He is a former National Individual Poetry Slam Champion and has been regularly featured on National Public Radio.
David Lovelace is a writer, carpenter, and former owner of the Montague Bookmill, a bookstore near Amherst Massachusetts. His memoir Scattershot (Dutton, 2008) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and won the National Alliance for Mental Illness Ken Book Award, among other honors. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Patterson Review’s Allen Ginsberg Award. Lovelace lives in western Massachusetts.
Tova Mirvis is the author of two novels: the national bestseller The Ladies Auxiliary (W.W. Norton, 1999) and The Outside World (Knopf, 2004). She is at work on a third. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Poets and Writers, and elsewhere, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She was a 2009 Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and a 2010 Visiting Scholar at The Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. She has taught writing at Columbia College, Gotham Writer’s Workshop, and Grub Street in Boston.
Leslie Williams is the author of the poetry collection Success of the Seed Plants (Bellday Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Bellday Books Prize. She is also the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and awards from the Ragdale Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and in many other magazines. A North Carolina native, she now lives near Boston with her husband and two sons.
Lara JK Wilson‘s short stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, and American Fiction, among others. Her prizewinning story in the 2007 Nelson Algren Awards was featured in the Chicago Tribune book section. Other stories have won the So to Speak Fiction Contest, first-runner-up in the Mark Twain Award contest, and nominations for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. She was a fiction scholar at both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and is a board member and teaches fiction at Grub Street in Boston.