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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.

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 20, 2009 • Bert Stern

Bert Stern was born in Buffalo, New York in 1930. He was educated at the University of Buffalo, Columbia, and at Indiana University, where he earned his Ph.D. in English. Stern taught for forty years at Wabash College, where he is now Milligan Professor of English, Emeritus. He also taught from 1965-67 at the University of Thessaloniki and from 1984-85 at Peking University. He presently teaches in the Changing Lives Through Literature program. He is the author of Steerage (Ibbetson Street Press, 2009) and a chapbook, Silk/The Ragpicker's Grandson (Red Dust, 1998). His poems have been published in New Letters, The American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, among others, and in a number of anthologies. His essays and reviews have appeared in Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Modern Language Review, The New Republic, Southern Review, Columbia Teachers’ College Record, Adirondack Life, and a number of anthologies. His critical study, Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, was published by the University of Michigan Press.

Oct 18, 2009 • Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies. Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the 2009 American Book Award.

Nov 15, 2009 • Katie Peterson

Katie Peterson is a 2009-2010 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA. Her first book, This One Tree, won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was published in 2006. Her poems and reviews have appeared widely. She is the Robert B. Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College, a very small experimental college for men in rural Inyo County, California.

Dec 20, 2009 • Rosanna Warren

Canceled because of snowstorm!

Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1953. She studied painting at Yale University, where she graduated in 1976, and an MA in 1980 from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Departure (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003); Stained Glass (1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984); and Snow Day (1981). She has also published a translation of Euripides's Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995), a book of literary criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), and has edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989). Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the May Sarton Prize, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Ingram Merrill Grant for Poetry, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, the Nation/"Discovery" Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was The New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the poetry editor of Daedalus. She is Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Jan 17, 2010 • Joseph Featherstone & Jonathan Weinert

Joseph “Jay” Featherstone is a poet, writer, and educator. He was an editor of the New Republic, and has served as the principal of the Commonwealth School in Boston, and for many years as the faculty leader of an acclaimed teacher education program at Michigan State University. He is the author of a number of books, including Dear Josie, Witnessing the Hopes and Failures of Democratic Education (Teachers College Press, 2002). His work has appeared in magazines such as Ploughshares and the Harvard Review. He has published a poetry collection, Brace's Cove (New Issues), and has a new ms in preparation. Featherstone and his family have been living in East Gloucester – summers, part-time, or full-time – since the 1960’s.

Jonathan Weinert was born in Boston and grew up in Wellesley. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program. His first book, In the Mode of Disappearance (Nightboat Books, 2008), was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2006 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and was named a finalist for the 2009 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Weinert's poems and reviews appear in many journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review,32 Poems, and Blackbird. He is the web editor for the letterpress literary journal Tuesday; An Art Project, and is an interdisciplinary advisor at the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with the poet Amy M. Clark and their son Jonah.

Feb 28, 2010 • Frannie Lindsay

Frannie Lindsay's newest volume of poetry, Mayweed, is the 2009 winner out of the Washington Prize. Her previous books are Lamb (Perugia Press, 2006) and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). She is the 2008 winner of the Missouri Review Prize.

Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Field, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, Harvard Review, Poetry East, Tampa Review, Hunger Mountain, and many other journals. They have also been featured on Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio's Writer's Almanac.

She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts with her two retired greyhounds. She is also a classical pianist.

Mar 21, 2010 • Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. Her recent collections of poetry include On the Ground (Graywolf, 2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), and The End (1992). Howe is also the author of several novels and prose collections, most recently, The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (Nightboat Books, 2005) and Nod (Sun & Moon Press, 1998). She has written short stories, books for young adults, and the collection of literary essays The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (University of California Press, 2003). Howe was the recipient of the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems. She has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Apr 18, 2010 • Joyce Peseroff

Joyce Peseroff has been a Writer in Residence and Visiting Professor at University of Massachusetts, Boston since 1997. Her areas of specialty are creative writing and 20th century American poetry. She holds an MFA from the University at California at Irvine. She has received grants from the NEA and Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and is on the faculty at U. Mass Boston. She studied with Donald Justice during the year he taught in the MFA program at UC Irvine. Her three books of poems are The Hardness Scale, A Dog in the Lifeboat, and Mortal Education. Her forthcoming books are Eastern Mountain Time (poems) and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Peseroff is also the editor of Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake and The Ploughshares Poetry Reader. For many years she was associated with Ploughshares magazine, first as managing editor and then as associate poetry editor; she continues as one of the magazine's advisory editors. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize. New poems are in recent issues of Greensboro Review, Salamander, Barrow Street, Provincetown Arts, and the on-line magazine Slate.

May 16, 2010 • Linda Pastan and Meg Kearney

Linda Pastan was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx in 1932. She graduated from Radcliffe College and received an M.A. from Brandeis University. She is the author of Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton, 2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award; An Early Afterlife (l995); Heroes In Disguise (1991), The Imperfect Paradise (1988), a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (l982), which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Five Stages of Grief (l978), and A Perfect Circle of Sun (l971). Among her many awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was a recipient of a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award. From 1991 to 1995, she served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, and was among the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Meg Kearney’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher’s guide, came out in 2007. Her latest collection of poems is Home By Now (Four Way Books, fall 2009). Meg’s picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis and is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and The Gettysburg Review. Her work also is featured in the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998), Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline Press, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way Books, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007); Sinatra: But Buddy, I’m a Kind of Poem (Entasis Press, 2008), and The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review (Bellevue Literary Press, 2008). Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” appears in The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Kathryn Stripling Byer (Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press, 2005). Meg is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference. She was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards) in New York City. Recipient of 2001 Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998; the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York in 1997. She is a former poetry editor of Echoes, a quarterly literary journal, and past president of the Hudson Valley Writers Association of upstate New York. She currently resides in New Hampshire with her three-legged black Lab, Trooper.

Jun 13, 2010 • Kevin Goodan

Kevin Goodan’s most recent book of poems is Winter Tenor (Alice James Books, 2009); his first book, In the Ghost-House Acquainted, was published by Alice James Books in 2004 and chosen for the 2005 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. His poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Colorado Review and American Poet. Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana, Goodan began working for the U.S. Forest Service at a young age. He has lived in Northern Ireland and western Massachusetts. He received his M.F.A. degree from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his B.A. degree from the University of Montana. He has taught at the University of Connecticut and as Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University. He is an Assistant Professor at Lewis-Clark State College, and lives on a bluff overlooking the Clearwater River.

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

Also of interest:
Poetry Workshop at Framingham Public Library with Prof. Alan Feldman

Wednesdays, January 13 – April 14, 7:00–9:00pm (Except February 10 and 17)