Brookline Poetry Series
The Brookline Poetry Series is pleased to offer its reading series for 2021-22. We have a stellar line-up for the series this fall, which will take place via Zoom at our usual time, the third Sunday of each month, from 2-4 PM. Our invited poets will read, starting at 2 PM, followed by an open mic. Sign-up for the open mic will be available at 1:45 in the chat box.
Each month, you will receive a Zoom invitation in your email for the reading. Click on the link in the email and follow succeeding instructions to access the reading.
In order to receive the link for each reading, you must be on the Brookline Poetry Series mailing list. To get on the list, you may contact the organizers via email at brooklinepoetry@minlib.net. Please put “Brookline Poetry Series” in the subject heading. Please do not send written correspondence in care of the Library.
Featured Readers
November 21, 2021: Meg Kearney & Joan Houlihan
Meg Kearney is author of the poetry collections All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize; Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year; and An Unkindness of Ravens (2001). The Ice Storm, a heroic crown, came out with Green Linen Press in 2020. Meg has also published three novels in verse for teens. Her picture book, Trouper (2013), was illustrated by E.B. Lewis and received the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the Missouri Show Me Reader’s Award. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac.” Former Associate Director of the National Book Foundation in New York, Meg is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. For more information: www.megkearney.com.
Joan Houlihan is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books, 2021). Her previous books include Shadow-feast, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; The Us, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; the sequel Ay (both from Tupelo Press); and Hand-Held Executions. Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins; and The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making. She currently serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan is the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
December 19, 2021: Nickole Brown & Jessica Jacobs
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, Jessica lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on a collection of poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.
January 16, 2022: Danielle Legros Georges & Gail Mazur
Danielle Legros Georges is a writer, translator, academic, and the author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten prize. She was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019. Her most recent work is the book of translations, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert.
Gail Mazur’s eighth collection, Land’s End: New & Selected Poems, was published in 2020. Earlier books include: Forbidden City; Figures in a Landscape; Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems, winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award and finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and They Can’t Take That Away from Me, finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. She is a former fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and has taught widely including in Boston University’s MFA in Writing Program and in The Fine Art Work Center’s Summer Program. Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series which she directed for 29 years and is now directed by Andrea Cohen.
February 20, 2022: Adrian Matejka & Paul Nemser
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), Mixology (Penguin, 2009), and The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), which focuses on Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion of the world and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His fourth collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. Forthcoming in 2021 are a mixed media collection inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), and a collection of poems Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin). His first graphic novel Last On His Feet will be published in 2022 by Liveright. Among Matejka’s honors are fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University Bloomington and served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19.
Paul Nemser is the author of A Thousand Curves, which won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press, and was published in April 2021. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. Tales of the Tetragrammaton (2014), a chapbook, was published by Mayapple Press. Nemser’s poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Plume, and TriQuarterly. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, MA, and Harborside, ME.
March 20, 2022: Roger Reeves & Ilene H. Rudman
Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and two Pushcart Prizes, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Princeton University. An associate professor of poetry in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin, his second collection of poetry, Best Barbarian, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
Ilene H. Rudman is a Boston-area poet, career counselor and psychotherapist. Her poems have appeared in various journals including: The Comstock Review, CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Crab Creek Review, the anthology Kind of Hurricane Press, Apeiron Review, An Anthology of New England Writers, Passengers, and LEON Literary Review. Her first chapbook Staying the Night, recently published by Finishing Line Press, was a finalist in the 2019 Comstock Review’s Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest.
April 10, 2022: Cammy Thomas & Monica McAlpine
Cammy Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, has just come out. All are published by Four Way Books. Far Past War, a choral work by composer Augusta Read Thomas based on two of her poems, will premiere at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Monica McAlpine published her first book of poems, Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) at age eighty. Other poems of hers have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Leon, Poetry Quarterly, The Aurorean, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Professor Emerita at University of Massachusetts Boston, where she taught for thirty-six years and directed the Honors Program, McAlpine is the author of two books and several articles on medieval literature. She has exhibited her paintings with local art associations. She and her husband live in Brookline; they have two grandchildren.
May 15, 2022: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal & Dorothy Derifield
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son in Los Angeles. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.
Dorothy Derifield is the director of the long-running literary reading series, Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain. She is also a member of the committee that directs the Rozzie Reads Poetry Reading Series in Roslindale. She is the author of the book Zero Plus Time (Cherry Grove Collections, 2020) and a chapbook, The River and the Lakes. Her work has won an Editor’s Award from Plainsongs and has appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly among other journals. She is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets and lives in Roslindale.
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. The 2021-22 series will be virtual from September through December. We will post information here about whether January-June will be virtual or in person as soon as it becomes available.
Brookline Poetry Series Co-Directors: Ann Killough, Susan Jo Russell, Aimée Sands
Contact: brooklinepoetry@minlib.net. Please put “Brookline Poetry Series” in the subject heading. Please do not send written correspondence in care of the Library.