Holi Celebration at Belmont Books

Join us for a celebration of Holi and show you love for some great local authors!

Anjali Mitter Duva is an Indian American writer raised in France. She is the author of the bestselling historical novel Faint Promise of Rain. She is also a co-founder of Chhandika, a non-profit organization that teaches and presents India’s classical storytelling kathak dance. Educated at Brown University and MIT, Anjali is a frequent speaker at conferences, festivals, libraries, schools and other cultural institutions. She was a finalist for a 2018 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In her spare time, she runs a book club for teens and the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly literary series. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two daughters, and is currently at work on her second novel.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a physician and writer with work in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She has received a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Sewanee Writers Conference scholarship and Henfield award for her writing.

Rishi Reddi is the author of Karma and Other Stories and winner of the 2008 PEN New England / L.L. Winship prize for fiction. Her short stories have been aired on National Public Radio, performed at New York City’s Symphony Space, and published in Best American Short Stories, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Her essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Asian American Literary Review, and the Partisan Review. She has received grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, United States Department of State, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Kirun Kapur‘s first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, was awarded the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award and was a finalist for the Mass Book Prize, the Julie Suk Award and several other prizes. It was published in 2015 by Elixir Press. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prarie Schooner and others. She has taught creative writing at Boston University, Brandeis University, and has been granted fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. Additional honors include the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and a Glenna Luschei award. In 2015, NBCNews named her to their list of Asian-American Poets to Watch. Kirun currently teaches at Amherst College and serves as the Poetry Editor for The Drum Literary Magazine.

Poets & Pints: October 11

Join Porter Square Books in their celebration of poetry: Poets & Pints

The greater Somerville and Cambridge area is lucky to have such a vibrant poetry community. So, once a month we will gather at the community space at Aeronaut on the Duck Village stage, to celebrate that community with readings by three local poets.
The event will feature a social hour from 6-7 in which you can grab a beer and converse with the poets, hosts, and other poetry fans. The formal reading will be from 7-8 and will feature three local poets reading from their latest works.
The poets reading on October 11 are:

Poems by PAULA BONNELL have appeared in a variety of print and online publications including APR, Reviews — Hopkins, Hudson, Manhattan Poetry, Southern Poetry, Women’s of Books — and independents such as Gargoyle, Invisible City, and Rattle. Even in newspapers — The Real Paper and a Sunday Boston Herald.  Also in 4 collections — Airs & Voices, which Mark Jarman selected for the Ciardi Prize; Message, which includes “Midwest” as heardon The Writer’s Almanac and “Eurydice”, chosen for a Poet Lore narrative poetry publication award; and two chapbooks, Before the Alphabet – a story in free verse of a child’s kindergarten year, and tales retold, published in April 2017 — new takes on stories you’ll recognize.

SCOTT RUESCHER’s full-length collection of poems, Waiting for the Light to Change, was published by Prolific Press in May 2017. Some of the poems in the book have won the 2016 Write Prize from Able Muse magazine, the 2015 Rebecca Lard Award from Poetry Quarterly, and, in both 2013 and 2014, the Erika Mumford Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Others have appeared in recent issues of Origins Journal, Solstice, About Place, Agni Online, The Harvard Educational Review, Shadowgraph Quarterly, and The Somerville News. A shameless “evangelist for reality” who declaims “its glitzy multitudinosity in long cinematic sentences” (according to Tony Hoagland), he administers the Arts in Education program at Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaches English in the Boston University Prison Education Program.

NATALIE SHAPERO is the Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University and an editor at large of the Kenyon Review. Her poetry collections are Hard Child and No Object.

This event is free and open to the public!

 

Where’s Waldo? Kid’s Party

You’ve spent all month finding Waldo around Brookline—now come in and celebrate with Brookline Booksmith! Treats, activities, prizes, and a real live Waldo to find in the store. Bring your Waldo Passport to claim your rewards!

30th Joiner Institute Writers’ Workshop Poetry and Music Celebration

Join the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences based at UMass Boston for a night of music and poetry celebrating the 30th year of our annual Writers Workshop and its community and creative response to war.  Featuring poetry readings by Yusef Komunyakaa, Kevin Bowen, Nguyen Ba Chung, and more TBA.

Live music performed by Layth Sadiq, the UMB Jazz Trio, and more TBA.

Hosted by the Boston Public Library, this event is not ticketed.