Solstice Magazine Benefit & Night Riffs at The Rockwell

You are invited to our annual benefit! Join us for SOCIALIZING & BRIEF READINGS BY NIGHT RIFFS GUEST AUTHORS (introduced by Dzvinia Orlowsky):

  • Oliver de la Paz, 
  • Jabari Asim,
  • Richard Hoffman, and
  • Ewa Chrusciel

There will be LIVE MUSIC by West Street Jazz, a Boston-based jazz trio/quartet focusing on maintaining the jazz tradition and performing music from the greats, such as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Kenny Brunnell, and Grant Green.

Don’t miss out on the GOURMET GRATIS FOOD, CASH BAR, BOOK TABLE & AUTHOR SIGNINGS, AND OUR INFAMOUS SILENT AUCTION.

JOIN US FOR A CHANCE TO ACTIVELY SUPPORT DIVERSITY!  
Donations optional except for $10 cover at door.

Porsha Olayiwola & guests present I SHIMMER SOMETIMES, TOO at Boston Public Library

Porsha Olayiwola & Guests

SHIMMER: A Boston book-release and reading

City of Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola announces the release of “i shimmer sometimes, too“, her first collection of poems, out on November 19 through Button Poetry.

Porsha and guests will read from their work at the event. Readers will include: Crystal Valentine, Golden, Ashley Rose, Andrine Pierresaint, Princess Moon, Jha D, Claudia Wilson.

+ DJ Whysham

Copies of “i shimmer sometimes, too” will be available for sale at this event.
Porsha will be available to sign copies of her book after the speaking program.

_____

Porsha Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and is the current poet laureate for the City of Boston.

Website | Instagram @porshaolayiwola | Facebook @PorshaO | Twitter @porshaolayiwola

November U35 Reading by Mass Poetry at Trident Booksellers & Cafe

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under 35, held once each January, March, May, July, September, and November. The series seeks to promote and bolster young Massachusetts poets while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets. If you are a poet under the age of 35, sign up to read via Mass Poetry’s website! This event is free and open to the public.

http://www.masspoetry.org/u35

Our November readers are Sally Burnette, Adrie Rose, and Carolyn Oliver.

Sally Burnette is the author of the chapbooks laughing plastic (Broken Sleep Books) and Special Ultimate: Baby’s Story: a Documentary (Ghost City Press). They are originally from North Carolina but currently live in Boston, where they teach in the First-Year Writing Program at Emerson College and read flash fiction for Split Lip Magazine. Recent work has been published/is forthcoming in Occulum, pidgeonholes, Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.

Adrie Rose writes, works with herbs, and organizes for Extinction Rebellion in occupied Nipmuck and Pocumtuc territory. Her work has previously appeared in Rebelle Society, Plum, Peregrine, Albatross, The Essential Herbal, Poetry Breakfast, and Ibbetson Street Review. Her poem “In the Liminal” was awarded second place in the Robert P. Colleen Poetry Competition. She studied creative writing at Bennington College and the SC Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities, and is currently a student at Smith College.

Carolyn Oliver (carolynoliver.net) lives in Worcester with her family. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sixth Finch, Southern Indiana Review, and Sugar House Review. She is the winner of the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry and the Frank O’Hara Prize from the Worcester Review.

Transnational Series presents: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in conversation at Brookline Booksmith Used Book Cellar

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in conversation with Laetitia Zecchini

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

A one-of-a-kind collection of work by one of India’s best contemporary poets.

Gathering the work of a lifetime, spanning four books of poetry and including thirty-four new poems, this is the first comprehensive collection to be published in the United States and the United Kingdom of the work of one of India’s most influential English-language poets. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life—whether contemporary or historical—bring larger patterns into focus. His celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of Collected Poems. Selections from The Absent Traveller and Songs of Kabir are followed by those of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral, Pavankumar Jain, and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Together they tell the story of Indian poetry over two millennia.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of several books of poetry, the editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, and the translator of The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry and Songs of Kabir. He lives in Dehradun.

Laetitia Zecchini is a research fellow at the CNRS in Paris, currently visiting scholar at BU. She is the author of a monograph on the poet Arun Kolatkar whom she has also translated into French, and writes on the « Bombay poets », on modernisms and the politics of literature. She is currently working on a book around issues of cultural / literary freedom and the poetics & politics of modernism in Cold War India and is part of the project writers and free expression.

July U35 Reading Series w/Mass Poetry

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under 35, held once each January, March, May, July, September, and November. The series seeks to promote and bolster young Massachusetts poets while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets. If you are a poet under the age of 35, sign up to read via Mass Poetry’s website!
http://www.masspoetry.org/u35

Our July readers are Wendy Chen, Kat Hobbs-Everett, and Amy Manion. Read more about them below:

Wendy Chen (wendychenart.com) is the author of Unearthings (Tavern Books), editor of Figure 1, and managing editor of Tupelo Quarterly. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Most Promising Young Poet Prize, and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her forthcoming translations of the poems of the Song dynasty writer Li Qingzhao will be published later this year under the title The Magpie at Night (Tavern Books). Chen earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and is currently working on a novel.

Kat Hobbs-Everett is a constructive deconstructionist. Anti-racist, poet, teacher, social justice advocate and community mobilizer. She attended UMASS Boston and has spent 23 years working in the human/social services field. Her areas of expertise include youth work, child welfare, trauma, addictions, mental health, social emotional learning, family engagement, equity, and challenge bias power and privilege to promote diversity and inclusion. Currently Kat runs a nonprofit with the love of her life Dennis, named Power of Self-Education (POSE) Inc. and she recently launched a cultural community center in Haverhill, MA called COCO Brown. She is also mom to 7, a Christian and a Capricorn. Kat has spent the past 7 years studying the correlation between sexuality and spirituality, she is in the process of using her research to finish her book A New Creation.

Amy Manion is a Boston-born Irish and Chinese girl just trying to make it in this world. She writes because she needs to and wants to. She writes to speak her truth and to express her voice in hopes that it will encourage others, especially Asian American women, to do the same. Amy was recently a semifinalist for GrubStreet’s Emerging Writer Fellowship in Boston. She has been a Photovoice participant as a member of a collective group of young adults in mental health recovery trying to educate peers, mental health providers, and the public about their experiences through photographs coupled with the written word. She has also had some of her work featured in mental health publications.

The Great American Poetry Challenge at Lit Crawl 2019

Mass Poetry is excited to host The Great American Poetry Challenge at Lit Crawl Boston. Get ready to flex your poetry muscles in this competitive creative challenge! Attendees will be grouped into five teams, and each team will be appointed an established poet — Anna V.Q. Ross, Febo, Ben Berman, Enzo Silon Surin, or Colleen Michaels — as their team cheerleader. Mass Poetry will provide a series of prompts (e.g., a certain number of lines, a certain meter, in the style of a certain poet). Each team will have up to 20 minutes to write their poem. For the last 15 minutes, one member from each team will read their poems aloud, and we’ll choose the winning team.

To see the full schedule of Lit Crawl programming, visit:

https://bostonbookfest.org/year-round-events/lit-crawl-boston/

May U35 Reading Series w/Mass Poetry

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under 35, held once each January, March, May, July, September, and November. The series seeks to promote and bolster young Massachusetts poets while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets. If you are a poet under the age of 35, sign up to read via Mass Poetry’s website!
http://www.masspoetry.org/u35

Our May readers are Shirley Jones-Luke, Kailey Tedesco, and Rhosalyn Williams. Read more about them below:

Shirley Jones-Luke is a writer, poet and public speaker who lives in Dorchester. Shirley is an educator with the Boston Public Schools, teaching English Language Arts. She has been published in several journals and magazines, including Anti-Heroin Chic, Deluge, For the Sonorous, and Longleaf Review. Her work has earned her spots at VONA (Voices of Our Nation), Tin House, Breadloaf and The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat. Shirley’s poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award.

Kailey Tedesco is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing), These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press) and Lizzie, Speak (White Stag Publishing). She is an associate editor for Luna Luna Magazine and a co-curator for A Witch’s Craft: Panel & Reading Series. You can find her work featured or forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, Bone Bouquet Journal, New South, fields, and more. For further information, please follow @kaileytedesco.

Rhosalyn Williams is a poet from Wenvoe, Wales and Tallahassee, Florida. She recently received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she taught poetry and worked as a reader for Barnstorm Literary Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Black Fox and Pulp. She currently works as a waitress and tutor.

Mark Halliday: The Robert Lowell Memorial Reading Series

Prize-winning poet Mark Halliday will read at Boston University with BU alumna Heather Green for the spring installment of the Robert Lowell Memorial Reading Series. Introduced by Robert Pinsky. This event is free and open to the public, with a reception and book signing to follow.

Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University.  His books of poems are:  Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018).  His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press.  He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).  He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996. Halliday has won the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Heather Green’s poems have appeared in AGNI online, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, the New Yorker, and many other journals, and are forthcoming in the Bennington Review.  Her translation of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won was published in 2018 by Octopus Books. Her translations of Tzara’s work have appeared in Asymptote, Open Letters Monthly, Poetry International, and several anthologies. She teaches at George Mason University.

Open Mic Poetry Night at Belmont Books

Join us for a night of poetry! Aspiring poets wanting to try something new and expert word crafters wanting to get a broader audience are welcome. We ask that each poet plan on reading 1-2 poems or about 5 minutes worth of craft.

Those interested in signing up for a spot should speak with a bookseller or email us at events@belmontbooks.com today!

We invite all poets age 12 and up to participate though Belmont Books is not responsible for content.

Prize-Winning Poet Mark Halliday: Robert Lowell Memorial Reading Series

Prize-winning poet Mark Halliday will read at Boston University with BU alumna Heather Green for the spring installment of the Robert Lowell Memorial Reading Series. Introduced by Robert Pinsky. This event is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow.

Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University.  His books of poems are:  Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018).  His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press.  He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).  He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996. Halliday has won the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Heather Green’s poems have appeared in AGNI online, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, the New Yorker, and many other journals, and are forthcoming in the Bennington Review.  Her translation of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won was published in 2018 by Octopus Books. Her translations of Tzara’s work have appeared in Asymptote, Open Letters Monthly, Poetry International, and several anthologies. She teaches at George Mason University.