Brookline Poetry Series
The Brookline Poetry Series meets once a month on Sunday afternoons, September through June, in Hunneman Hall at the Public Library of Brookline Main Branch (361 Washington St., Brookline, MA 02445). Usually, one or two established poets read, followed by an open mike. You may contact the organizers via email.
- Timing of performances:
- 1:30 PM • Doors open
- 1:45 PM • Open mike sign-up
- 2 – 4 PM • Poetry readings
N.B. Usually the third Sunday of the month, except the first or second Sunday in June. On rare occasions, this may vary to accommodate holidays or special Library events, so be sure to check the Library Calendar or this page before attending. (Often, the February date varies as well so as not to conflict with the BLMA concert or the Winter Gala.)
Featured Readers
Sep 19, 2010 • David Young
David Young was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1936. He earned a B.A. from Carleton College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Black Lab (Knopf, 2006); At the White Window (2000); Night Thoughts and Henry Vaughan (1994), which won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry; The Planet on the Desk: Selected and New Poems 1960-1990 (1991); Foraging (1986); Earthshine (1988); The Names of a Hare in English (1979); Work Lights: Thirty-Two Prose Poems (1977); and Boxcars (1972).
His first collection, Sweating Out the Winter (1969), was selected by William Stafford, Isabella Gardner, and Stanley Kunitz for the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. Young has also published numerous volumes of translation, including Out on the Autumn River: Selected Poems by Du Mu (2006) and Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji (1998), both with Jiann I. Lin; Selected Poems by Eugenio Montale (2004), with Charles Wright and Jonathan Galassi); The Poetry of Petrarch (2004); The Book of Fresh Beginnings: Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1994), Miroslav Holub's Vanishing Lung Syndrome and The Dimension of the Present Moment (both 1990), Five T'ang Poets (1990), Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1987), and Rilke's Duino Elegies (1980).
He has edited several anthologies, most recently Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem (with Stuart Friebert, 1995), and has published several volumes of criticism and prose, including Six Modernist Moments in Poetry (2006), The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy (1990) and Seasoning: A Poet's Year, With Seasonal Recipes (1999). For the latter, and for his general accomplishments as a poet, he was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize.
About Young's most recent book of poems, the poet Stanley Plumly wrote, "In keeping with the whole heart of all his work, David Young’s Black Lab draws from a variety of sources—a fellowship of poets, an intimacy of landscape, a celebration of the elegy—yet comes, in each of the poems, to a single, and singular, place of rest, calm, and clarity. There is a quality of beatitude, an elevation of the quotidian, a defining of value here. This is a book to carry, to rejoice in on those dark days."
His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as a Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship.
Young has been Longman Professor of English at Oberlin College since 1986 and an editor of FIELD magazine since 1969. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.
Oct 17, 2010 • Ronaldo Wilson
Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of Publishing Triangle’s 2010 Thom Gunn Award, as well as selections in a variety of journals and anthologies. He has held fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, The Anderson Center for the Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Yaddo Corporation, and has had four poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
As a National Research Council Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, Wilson completed his dissertation Black Bodies Black Field(s): 20th Century and Contemporary Poetics of the Black Body in African American Poetry and Visual Culture. In this project, he focuses on how the black body is presented, mined, re-inscribed, broken apart and, ultimately, re-presented as an attempt to map out a poetics of its recovery by looking at the writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Renee Gladman, and the contemporary visual artists Ellen Gallagher and William Pope. He currently teaches at Mt. Holyoke College.
Nov 21, 2010 • Marjorie Agosin
Marjorie Agosín is a well-known spokesperson for the plight and priorities of women in Third World countries. Her book, Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras (Red Sea Press, 1987, translated by Cola Franzen), tells of Chilean women who make their struggles known to the world through the exposition of "arpilleras," folk tapestries which tell of their bravery and hardships in the face of oppression. Money from the sale of these handicrafts aids them in supporting families in which the men have been arrested, murdered, or have simply "disappeared." Her concern for women in Chile has also been the focus feature articles in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, and the Barnard Occasional Papers on Women's Issues.
She has published a number of collections of poetry, memoir and non-fiction. Among her most recent titles are La Luce del Deseo (The Light of Desire), 2010; Cartographies: Meditation on Travel, 2004; and At The Threshold of Memory; New and Selected Poems, 2003.
She received the 1995 Letras de Oro Prize for Poetry, presented by Spain’s Ministry of Culture and the North-South Center of the University of Miami to a writer of Hispanic heritage living in the U.S. Marjorie Agosín is a Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College where she teaches courses in Spanish language and Latin American literature.
Dec 19, 2010 • January O’Neil
January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009). Her poems and articles have appeared in North American Review, 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 was a finalist for ForeWord Reviews 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 Beverly, MA.
Jan 16, 2011 • Tam Lin Neville
Tam Lin Neville was born in New York City in 1944. She received her B.A. in Religion from Temple University in Philadelphia and her M.F.A. in poetry from Vermont College in 1989. She spent four formative years living in China and Japan, studying the language and teaching, and returned to this country with a strong interest in Eastern poetry, particularly the Tang Dynasty poets of China.
Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Ironwood, Mademoiselle, The Massachusetts Review, and Sulfur. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Hungry Mind Review, and The Threepenny Review. Her interview with Tomas Transtromer was published in Painted Bride Quarterly and is available on the new Transtromer website (www.tomastranstromer.com).
She has received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Somerville Arts Council. Her chapbook Dreaming in Chinese won Calypso Press' first chapbook competition in 1995. In 1998 her book-length manuscript, Journey Cake, was published by BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
She presently administers and teaches in Changing Lives Through Literature, a program designed for women and men on probation.
Feb 20, 2011 • Valerie Duff and Andrea Cohen
Valerie Duff is the poetry editor for Salamander Magazine, and she has received St Botolph and Massachusetts Cultural Council grants for her poetry. She earned her masters degrees in creative writing from Boston University and Trinity College, Dublin.
Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Harvard Review, PN Review, AGNI, Zoland Poetry: an Annual of Poems, Translations and Interviews, and elsewhere; her book reviews have appeared in Salamander, Bostonia, and PN Review.
Valerie is a freelance writer and editor for Bedford/St Martin’s Press. She lives in Boston with her husband and two children.
Andrea Cohen is the author of the poetry collections The Cartographer’s Vacation and Long Division. New poetry and fiction is out or forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Memorious, Glimmertrain, Salmagundi, Fulcrum, and the Zoland Annual.
Her awards include a PEN Discovery Award, fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and a Glimmertrain prize for short fiction. She runs the Blacksmith House Reading Series in Cambridge and writes about marine research at MIT.
Mar 20, 2011 • David Rivard
David Rivard was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1953. He is the author of Bewitched Playground (Graywolf Press, 2000); Wise Poison, which won the 1996 James Laughlin Award; and Torque (1987), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the Pitt Poetry Series.
His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and TriQuarterly.
His other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has also received the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Pushcart Prize.
He is Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review and teaches at Tufts University and the Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing Program. He lives in Cambridge.
Apr 17, 2011 • Daniel Johnson
Daniel Johnson was raised in Salem, Ohio. He has worked as an educator and teaching artist for more than 10 years in public schools, hospitals, and prisons. He is the founding director of 826 Boston, a nonprofit youth writing center for students ages 6 to 18, which is fronted by the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute.
How to Catch a Falling Knife, his first book of poetry, was published by Alice James Books in May 2010. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including The Best American Poetry 2007, jubilat, VERSE, Barrow Street, and in the anthology I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio.
He lives with his wife in Cambridge.
May 15, 2011 • Suzanne Berger and Mary O’Donoghue
Suzanne E. Berger, poet, essayist, and teacher, is the author of These Rooms, a book of poems published by Penman Press, Legacies, a collection published by Alice James Books, and Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin) a memoir of being disabled by back injury which received world wide notice.
She has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the Somerville Arts Council, and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. She teaches a poetry class at Lesley University. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York times Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Antaeus, and many other journals.
She has been a Vista volunteer, a community organizer, a Headstart teacher, and a tutor for ESL students. She is the mother of one child, whom she raised lying down. Today she finds the world of being “upright” after eight years of disability to always be an exciting adventure.
Her poems and short stories have appeared in many European and North American journals and anthologies. Her translations of the work of Irish-language poet Louis de Paor feature in the first major bilingual edition of his work, Ag Greadadh Bas sa Reilig/ Clapping in the Cemetery (Cló Iar-Chonnachta).
Her writing awards include the Salmon Poetry Prize for a first collection, Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer, a Tyrone Guthrie/Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, and an artist's grant from Massachusetts Cultural Council.
She teaches rhetoric, writing fiction and literature at Babson College.
History of the Brookline Poetry Series
The Brookline Poetry Series was founded in the spring and summer of 2001 by our friend and fellow poet Diane Collins Ouellette. Diane died of cancer several months into the series, and, with her husband Berred's support, we continued. We are guided by her original mission: a quality venue for local poets, both published and yet-to-be published; a place for a multiplicity of poetic voices; a series particularly dedicated to featuring the work of Brookline poets.
In the years since, we have featured the best contemporary voices in American poetry, as well as many fine local poets.
We are dedicated to providing a forum for poets of all experience to listen and read their work. In 2005, the Boston Globe named us the Best in Boston for our open mike.
We welcome all Boston-area poets to our series.
Since March 2008, the series has been held at the Public Library of Brookline.
Ann Killough
Susana Roberts
Aimee Sands