2013 Commonwealth Reading Series Bios
Tuesday, April 2, 2013, 7 PM, Newtonville Books
Kathy Crowley‘s short stories have appeared in Ontario Review, Fish Stories, The Literary Review, New Millenium Writings and The Marlboro Review. Her stories have been short-listed for Best American Short Stories, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized. She has twice been awarded the MCC Artist Fellowship. She recently finished her first novel, writes for the publishing/writing blog Beyond the Margins, and works as a physician at Boston Medical Center.
Dr. Lisa Gruenberg is the author of short stories as well as a Holocaust memoir, Searching for Mia. Dr. Gruenberg received an honorable mention for the 2011 Glimmer Train Press “Family Matters” competition, a Joan Jakobson Scholarship to the 2011 Wesleyan Writers Conference, and is a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston and Grub Street Writers. Dr. Gruenberg works at Children’s Hospital Boston and teaches at Harvard Medical School. In 2010, she was named to the Fulbright Senior Consultant Roster for Global Health. Dr. Gruenberg has provided volunteer medical services with the Metrowest Free Medical Program, the Indian Health Service, in South Africa, Rwanda and Bangladesh. She is working on a novel based on her experiences working in Africa.
Marsha Pomerantz‘s poems and prose have been published in journals in the US, UK, and Israel, and she has translated poetry, short fiction, and a novel from the Hebrew. Her poetry collection The Illustrated Edge was named one of the best poetry books of 2011 by the Boston Globe. Her writing has been supported by two residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and she has twice been a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award. She is managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums.
Catherine Stearns is the Head of the English Department at Belmont Hill School, an independent school in Belmont, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Modern Poetry Studies, ND Quarterly, Poetry Southeast, Calliope, New Delta Review, and Iowa Journal of Literary Studies. She has won the McKnight Foundation Poetry Award and the Dana Poetry Award, and her poetry collection The Transparency of Skin won the Minnesota Voice Project.
Jonathan Weinert‘s first book, In the Mode of Disappearance, won the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and was named a finalist for the 2009 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems and reviews appear in many journals, including Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Witness, American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and 32 Poems. Jonathan is co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin. His chapbook, Thirteen Small Apostrophes, is forthcoming from Back Pages Publishers.
Sunday, April 7, 2013, 4 PM, Gulu-Gulu Café
Carrie Bennett‘s poetry chapbook The Quiet Winter was published by dancing girl press in 2012, and her first book of poetry, Biography of Water, won the 2004 Word Works’ Washington Prize. Her poems have appeared in America Literary Review, Boston Review, Caketrain, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Horse Less Review, Indiana Review, Interim, Salamander, among others. She currently teaches writing at Boston University.
Perry Glasser is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and memoirist. His memoir collection, metamemoirs, was published by Outpost19 in December 2012, and his most recent novel, Riverton Noir, won the Gival Press Novel Award. He was a fellow at the Norman Mailer House, the Virigina Center for the Creative Arts, Ucross, and Yaddo, and a scholar at Bread Loaf. His many awards include the annual Boston Fiction Festival prize (in consecutive years), The Good Men Foundation First Prize, and the P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award (three times). His memoirs, essays, and fiction have appeared in such journals as Utne, Northwest Review, The Antioch Review, Confrontation, Salamander, The North American Review, and elsewhere, and since 1994, he has been a Contributing Editor of North American Review.
Bud Jennings completed NYU’s graduate creative writing program and writes mostly fiction. He finished a first novel last summer, and recently he had a story in Educe and a creative nonfiction piece in Superstition Review. Previous work has appeared in Christopher Street, Between C&D, and Stuff (Boston). An excerpt of his novel was included in Coloring Book: An Eclectic Anthology of Fiction & Poetry by Multicultural Writers (Rattlecat Press). Along with his MCC award, Bud has received support from the Blue Mountain Center, the New York State Writers Institute, and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
Michelle Lanzoni is a writer and environmental scientist whose awards include the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award (for her literature) and the Clinton Global Initiative Award (for her environmental work). She has been published in North American Review and Camas and was a Finalist for the New Letters Award and Honorable Mention for the New Millennium Writings Award. Her essay “Flies from Tahrir” is included in the anthology A Natural History of Now: Reports from the Edge of Nature (Kelson Books).
Rodney Wittwer‘s first book of poetry, Gone & Gone, was published by Red Hen Press in 2012. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Memorious, Pebble Lake Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and Verse Daily, among others. Before being published, Gone & Gone was a semi-finalist/finalist for several book prizes, including those from Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Elixir Press, Marsh Hawk Press, Tupelo Press, and the University of Wisconsin Brittingham/Pollak Awards.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013, 7 PM, American Antiquarian Society
Kathryn Burak‘s stories and poems have been published in the Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, Gettysburg Review and Fiction. She currently teaches writing at Boston University and is the co-author of Writing in the Works (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Her first novel Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things, published by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan in October 2012, was recently nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery.
Danielle Legros Georges is an associate professor in the Creative Arts in Learning Division of Lesley University, and the author of a book of poems, Maroon (Curbstone Press). Recent poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Bill Moyers Journal (PBS Program), Consequence, sx salon, and The Women’s Review of Books. She has poems forthcoming in Salamander and Callaloo.
Holly Guran, author of River Tracks (Poets Corner Press) and Mothers’ Trails (Noctiluca Press), has been a presenter in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and is a member of Jamaica Pond Poets. Publications include Poet Lore, Poetry East, Borderlands, Slipstream, Hawaii Pacific Review, Soundings, Blotter Magazine, Westchester Review and Salamander (forthcoming). Holly is retired after a long career at Roxbury Community College.
Caitlin O’Neil is currently a full time lecturer in English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a blogger at Ploughshares. Her short story “Waitress” won the 2012 Women Who Write International Short Prose Contest and her fiction has appeared in Drunken Boat, Beloit Fiction Journal, Faultline, and Bridge, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Formerly, she was an award-winning writer and producer for WGBH in Boston, and her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Poets and Writers magazine, and elsewhere.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 7 PM, Forbes Library
Amy Dryansky‘s newest poetry collection, Grass Whistle, was released in 2013 by Salmon Poetry. Her first book, How I Got Lost So Close To Home, was published by Alice James Books and individual poems have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Orion, The New England Review and Harvard Review. She’s also a former Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College, where she looked at the impact of motherhood on the work of women poets. Dryansky currently works for a regional land trust, teaches creative writing, and writes about what it’s like to navigate the territory of mother/artist/poet at her blog, Pokey Mama.
James Heflin is a writer and musician, and is arts editor of the Valley Advocate, where he writes about the arts and pens a weekly column and blog. He has twice received Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowships, and also writes literary and science fiction.
Brendan Mathew‘s short stories have been published in Port Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, and elsewhere. His story “My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer” was selected by Richard Russo for the Best American Short Stories 2010 anthology, and an excerpt from it was recorded and aired on NPR’s All Things Considered. He teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, MA.
DK McCutchen, MFA, is a full-time Lecturer at UMass Amherst, College of Natural Sciences, and recent Chair of the University Writing Committee. Her first book, The Whale Road (Random House NZ, Blake UK), is a creative nonfiction tale of low adventure and high science in the South Pacific which received a Pushcart Nomination and listed as a Notable Book in the 2005 Kiriyama Prize. She has publications with (among others) Fourth Genre, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rosebud, Isotope, Identity Theory, The Café Review, and several competition anthologies. Currently she is working on scientifically accurate, gender-bender, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction in a literary attempt to save the world.
Patricia Stacey is the author of The Boy Who Loved Windows (Da Capo Press). A writer, college teacher, and former editorial staff member of the Atlantic Monthly, she lives with her husband, Cliff, and their children, Elizabeth and Walker, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Julie Wu‘s first novel, The Third Son, will be published by Algonquin Books on April 30, 2013. Also a physician, Julie Wu has received a Vermont Studio Center Residency fellowship and was shortlisted for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Novel-in-Progress Award.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013, 7 PM, Cambridge Public Library
Martin Edmunds has won the National Poetry Series Open Competition, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize, and the Harvard Monthly Prize for Literary Promise. He co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film Passion in the Desert, which received the National Board of Review Award for Special Excellence in Filmmaking. His poetry collection The High Road to Taos is published by University of Illinois Press. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Little Star, A Public Space, Paris Review, AGNI, and elsewhere.
Tien-Yi Lee‘s work has appeared in the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review and American Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was also the recipient of the Missouri Review‘s Peden Prize for Best Short Story of 2010. Tien-Yi works as a graphic designer in Cambridge, MA, where she lives with her husband and two young sons. She is currently working on a novel.
Daniela Petrova‘s writing has won the Eric Hoffer Award Editors Prize and has been widely published, including in Marie Claire, Christian Science Monitor, Poets and Artists, and the anthologies Twenty Years After the Fall and Best New Writing 2008.
Lynne Potts is a writer and poet whose poems have appeared in: Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, Arts Times, Oxford Journal, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Phi Kappa Phi, and numerous other literary journals. Her numerous honors include winning the Backwards City Review Contest and the Bowery Poetry Club HD Contest. She has taught poetry on the elementary, high school and college levels.
Mary O’Donoghue is a poet and fiction writer. She has published two poetry collections Tulle (Lilliput Press) and Among These Winters (Dedalus Press), and her poems have appeared widely in Irish and international journals and anthologies. Her short stories have been published in The Dublin Review, The Recorder, AGNI, Salamander, Literary Imagination, and elsewhere. Her debut novel Before the House Burns was published by Lilliput Press in 2010. Mary O’Donoghue’s numerous honors include the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer, and she is an associate professor of English at Babson College, Massachusetts.