January 19
Head-shot of Gail Mazur
Born in Cambridge, Gail Mazur grew up in Auburndale, Massachusetts. In 1973, she founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Harvard Square, which she ran for 29 years before handing the reins the Andrea Cohen. As an activist with her late husband, the artist Michael Mazur, and others Massachusetts writers and artists, she co-founded, in 1968, Artists Against Racism and the War, and later they fought for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze.. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was for many years Distinguished Senior Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate program and in recent years in Boston University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown . Speaking of Blacksmith House Poetry, now under the direction of poet Andrea Cohen, Mazur has said, “We want to support and validate the work of poets, to make a dent in the isolation writers feel in their working life .” to bring poets from different worlds together.The Blacksmith reading series helps provide something like fellowship; it persists.”
Her first collection, Nightfire, was published in 1978, followed by The Pose of Happiness; The Common; They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award; Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, winner of The Massachusetts Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize; Figures in a Landscape; Forbidden City, and Land’s End: New and Selected Poems, in 2020. Recently she was awarded The Golden Rose for her work from the new England Poetry Society. Her forthcoming collection, Three Trees, will be published next year by the Arrowsmith Press.
Lloyd Schwartz is poet laureate of Somerville, the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a longtime arts critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. He’s published five books of poetry, a collection of his music reviews, and has edited three volumes devoted to the works of Elizabeth Bishop. Among his honors are the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and Academy of American Poets for his poetry. His poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His next collection, “Artur Schnabel and Josepf Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948)” and other poems will appear next year from Arrowsmith Press.
Sign-up for our open mic will start in the chat at 1:45 PM.
Please note that we will also be meeting online in February.