Brookline Poetry Series
The Brookline Poetry Series meets once a month on Sunday afternoons, September through May, normally 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. 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. (Also, all meetings are held at the Main Library if possible, but on very rare occasions we have had to move to the Coolidge Corner Branch because of a scheduling conflict.)
Featured Readers
Sep 16, 2012 • Jennifer Barber
Jennifer Barber is the author of Given Away (2012) and Rigging the Wind (2003), both from Kore Press. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Upstreet, Fulcrum, Field, Harvard Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Jewish Forward, Georgia Review, Poetry, Take Three: 3, Agni New Poet Series (Graywolf Press), Four Way Reader #2 (Four Way Books), and After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Santa Lucia Books).
She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Heinrich Böll Cottage Residency, a St. Botolph Grant-in-Aid and a Bruce Rossley Emerging Voices Award, and received the 2008 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award.
She is founding and current editor of the literary journal Salamander, now in its 20th year. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Oct 21, 2012 • Aimée Sands
Aimée Sands is a poet and independent documentary filmmaker. Her first book of poems The Green-go Turn of Telling, is forthcoming this year from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, Measure, Salamander and other literary journals. She is the co-director of the Brookline Poetry Series.
Her documentary short What Makes Me White? is currently in use as a tool for diversity and anti-racism work in over 200 colleges, churches, and nonprofits in the US and Canada. The film has also screened at a number of academic conferences. The project was recently awarded a $200,000 grant by the Kellogg Foundation, and Aimée is now expanding the film to an hour.
In her 20 plus years as a radio and television producer, Aimée has received 18 awards for her work, including an Emmy, a Peabody Award, and a San Francisco Film Festival Golden Gate Award. Her television credits include Africans in America, the landmark PBS series on America’s journey through slavery; We Are Family, a WGBH and PBS documentary on life in lesbian and gay families; and Two Intimate Journeys, a WGBH documentary contrasting a feminist and a New Right woman. She has produced in-depth news and documentaries for both WGBH-TV and Radio, as well as for NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.
Aimée is a past recipient of a National Press Foundation Spanish Language Fellowship, which enabled her to attain Spanish fluency in Mexico. She has an MFA from Bennington College and has taught at Clark University. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at Babson College.
Nov 18, 2012 • Eduardo Corral
Eduardo C. Corral’s most recent collection, Slow Lightning, received a Whiting Writers Award and was selected by Carl Phillips in the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Eduardo is a CantoMundo Fellow and holds degrees from ASU and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Post Road. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation award and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. He's the interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review.
Dec 16, 2012 • Nicole Terez Dutton
Nicole Terez Dutton received the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her manuscript If One of Us Should Fall, selected by Patricia Smith, to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Nicole earned an M.F.A. from Brown University. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Indiana Review and Salt Hill Journal. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently lives in Boston.
Jan 20, 2013 • Katia Kapovich & Freddy Frankel
KATIA KAPOVICH
Katia Kapovich has published nine volumes of poetry in English and Russian. Her latest collection is Cossacks and Bandits (Salt Publishing, 2007).
Born in Chişinău, the capital of Moldova, she later lived in Moscow and St Petersburg. Unable to publish her work in the former USSR because of her participation in a samizdat dissident group, she emigrated, moving in 1990 to Jerusalem, where she published her first collection, and then in 1992 to the USA.
In 2001, US Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected her for a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and she has also been Poet-in-Residence at Amherst College.
Her collection, Gogol in Rome (Salt, 2004), was shortlisted for the 2005 UK’s Jerwood Alderburgh Prize. Her English poems have also appeared in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Independent, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, The Antioch Review, and Jacket, among many others.
Katia now lives in Cambridge, where she co-edits Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.
FREDDY FRANKEL
Originally from South Africa, Freddy Frankel earned an advanced degree in psychiatry from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before migrating with his family to the US in 1962. He has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 1969, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry since 1997, and served as Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston from 1986 to 1997. Now retired from active practice he has shifted his focus to poetry, attending poetry classes at the Harvard Extension School and studying with Barbara Helfgott Hyett in her Workshop for Publishing Poets. He has also worked with Tom Daley in his Online Poetry Course.
His chapbook, Hottentot Venus, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2003; his first book, In A Stone's Hollow, by Fairweather, an imprint of Bedbug Press in 2006; his most recent book, Wrestling Angels, by Ibbetson Street Press in 2011. He won the Robert Penn Warren First Award of New England Writers in 2003. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several publications including Cape Codder, Concho River Review, Ibbetson Street. Jewish Currents, Lalitamba, The Larcom Review, Moment, The Oak, Passager, Senior Times, Ship of Fools, The Tusculum Review, and others. It has also been featured in the following anthologies: The Mercy of Tides, Rough Places Plain, and New England Writers 2003. He and his wife Betty live in Newton.
Feb 17, 2013 • CANCELED
This event was canceled because of snow.
Mar 10, 2013 • Brian Turner
Brian Turner is the author of two collections of poetry—Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise (Alice James Books; 2005, 2010). Both collections are also available in the U.K. from Bloodaxe Books. Here, Bullet is a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection and has won numerous awards, including the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and the 2007 Poets Prize. The 2009-2010 Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar, Brian has also been awarded a 2009 USA Hillcrest Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His work has been published in Poetry Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, and others. He teaches at Sierra Nevada College.
Apr 21, 2013 • Martha Collins
Martha Collins is the author of White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), as well as Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Blue Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library.
Martha’s other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Lannan residency grant, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize.
Martha founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. In spring 2010, she served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University.
Two books are forthcoming from Milkweed: Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap (co-translated with the author, 2013) and Day Unto Day (poems, 2014).
Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012 – 2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Richland, Washington, and worked as a civil engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Site for three years. Flenniken didn’t begin writing poems until her early 30s. Her second collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), is a meditation on Hanford and her home town. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association.
May 19, 2013 • Norah Pollard
Norah Pollard has received the Academy of American Poets Prize from the University of Bridgeport, and for several years edited The Connecticut River Review. Her work has appeared a number of times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. She has published three poetry collections with Antrim House, Leaning In; Report from the Banana Hospital; and, most recently, Death and Rapture in the Animal Kingdom. She lives in Stratford, Connecticut, with her cats Lilybeet and Phoenix.
George Kalogeris teaches English Literature and Classics in Translation at Suffolk University. He is the author of a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos (Antilever, 2012), and of a book of poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer, 2006).
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
Tam Lin Neville
Susana Roberts
Aimee Sands