The Public Library of Brookline

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.

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.

Featured Readers

Sep 21, 2008 • Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the author of five poetry collections, and editor of four others. His most recent volume, For the Confederate Dead, won the 2007 Quill Award in Poetry and has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and on NPR. Young's first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton, and later won the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. Young's second book, To Repel Ghosts, a "double album" based on the work of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was reissued in a "remix" version in 2005. Young's third poetry collection, Jelly Roll, won the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His previous collection, Black Maria, a film noir in verse, has been recently staged by the Providence Black Repertory Theater. Young's poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and many other journals. He is editor of the anthology Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, The Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems, the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Blues Poems, and, most recently, a companion Jazz Poems. He has an A.B. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is a recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and NEA Literature Fellow in Poetry. He has also taught at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, where he was the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry. Currently he is Atticus Haygood Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing, and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

Oct 19, 2008 • Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali is is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, and The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008). He is also the author of the novel Quinn’s Passage (blazeVox books), named one of "The Best Books of 2005" by Chronogram magazine. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. His work has been featured in many national journals such as Best American Poetry 2007, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, jubilat and Massachusetts Review. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books.

Nov 23, 2008 • David Ferry

David Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1924. He completed his education at Amherst College and Harvard University, and served as a Sergeant in the United States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946. His books of poetry and translation include His Epistles of Horace: A Translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), The Odes of Horace: A Translation (1998), Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993), Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992), Strangers: A Book of Poems (1983), On the Way to the Island (1960), and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems (1959). Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Ferry's other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College and a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dec 21, 2008 • Paula Bohince

Paula Bohince grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Her poems appear widely in such publications as Agni, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review, and The Yale Review. She has been the recipient of the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, residencies from the MacDowell Colony, and artist’s grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. She has taught at New York University, the New School, and elsewhere and was the University of Mississippi’s inaugural Summer Poet-in-Residence. In 2008, she will be the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts. She holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Pennsylvania.

Jan 18, 2009 • CANCELED! For snow.

Feb 15, 2009 • Barbara Helfgott Hyett

Barbara Helfgott Hyett is a cofounder of the Writer's Room of Boston and is currently the director of POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets. She has taught at Boston University, MIT, and Harvard University. The author of four collections of poetry including The Tracks We Leave, Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, and The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus, she has worked as a visiting poet in schools all over Massachusetts. Her programs with students, teachers, and families include reading and writing workshops in childhood memory, parenting, and watchfulness. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Opener: Alan Albert has published poems in 18 journals and a book, including The American Poetry Review, Poetry East, Mississippi Review, Southwest Review,, and others. He has been a Finalist and Semifinalist in the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Program and First Prize Winner in The Boston University Alumni Poetry Competition and The Worcester County Poetry Association Competition. He works as a clinical psychologist, treating individuals and couples, and runs an ongoing group. He currently is circulating a manuscript of poems entitled, The New Marriage Primer.

Mar 15, 2009 • Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky served from 1997 to 2000 as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives. In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998). Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, he received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975). He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel. Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass). His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate. Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Apr 19, 2009 • Erica Funkhouser

Erica Funkhouser is the author of four collections of poetry, including Pursuit (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), Sure Shot and Other Poems (1992) and Natural Affinities (1983). Her poems have been published in numerous magazines and literary journals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She has also worked as a playwright. She lives in Essex, Massachusetts.

May 17, 2009 • Elizabeth Kirschner and Miriam Levine

Elizabeth Kirschner has published three volumes of poetry, Twenty Colors, Postal Routes and Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees, all with Carnegie-Mellon University Press. A chapbook, The Red Dragon, was published by Permafrost, and in 2008 My Life as a Doll was published by Autumn House Press. As a lyricist, Kirschner has collaborated with many composers both in America and abroad. She set her poetry to Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Now titled The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons, it had its world premiere in Vienna in fall ’05 followed by an American debut in Boston. A CD of this music featuring soprano Jean Danton and pianist Thomas Stumpf was released from Albany Records in Spring ’07. The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons has been published by Musik Fabrik.. Kirschner has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and Boston College. She lives in Kittery, Maine.

Miriam Levine was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is Professor Emerita at Framingham State College, where she chaired the English Department and was Coordinator of the Arts and Humanities Program. She divides her time between Florida and Massachusetts.

Jun 7, 2009 • Fred Marchant

Fred Marchant is editor of the newly released, Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947, from Graywolf Press. He is also the author of three books of poetry: Tipping Point winner of the 1993 Washington Prize from The Word Works, Full Moon Boat (Graywolf Press, 2000) and House on Water, House in Air: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2002). He is also the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard a collection of poetry by the contemporary Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. This collection—an important historical document in itself—will be published by the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Ha Noi, Viet Nam. Marchant teaches at Suffolk University, where he is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program as well as the founder of the Suffolk University Poetry Center. He is also a longtime teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass-Boston, and teaches in its annual Writer's Conference. He has been a member of the Executive Board of PEN New England, where he was the Chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, and where he founded, among other activities, the PEN New England writing workshop at Northampton County House of Correction. He has been a recipient of fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Yaddo Foundation, and the McDowell Colony. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

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