Brookline Poetry Series

The Brookline Poetry Series meets once a month on Sunday afternoons, September through May, normally in Hunneman Hall at the Brookline Village Library (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 at brooklinepoetry@minlib.net. Please put “Brookline Poetry Series” in the subject heading. Please do not send written correspondence in care of the Library.

Timing of performances:

• 1:30 PM • Doors open
• 1:45 PM • Open mic 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 Brookline Village if possible, but on very rare occasions we have had to move to the Coolidge Corner Location because of a scheduling conflict.)

Featured Readers

September 16, 2018
Featured poet: Dana Levin

Dana Levin is the author of Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), Sky Burial (Copper Canyoon, 2011), Wedding Day (Copper Canyon 2005), and In the Surgical Theatre (Copper Canyon 1999). In the Surgical Theatre was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. She currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.

Opener: Christine Tierney

Christine Tierney (christinetierneypoet.com) is a poet, childcare aficionado, disco lover, and closeted comedian. She holds a BA in film from Emerson College, and an MFA in creative writing from The Stonecoast Writing Program. Her manuscript, make me unsick was selected as a finalist for the 2016 Gambling the Aisle Chapbook Contest, and as a semi-finalist for the 2017 Elyse Wolf Chapbook Contest. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the Best New Poets anthology, and has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Poet Lore, PMS, Sugar House Review, The Nervous Breakdown and other cool places. She is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the hip and hybrid-loving online literary journal, little leo.

October 21, 2018
Featured poet: Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of three collections of poetry: Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon 2017); The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon 2016); and Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, and the Harvard Review. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her next manuscript and fellowships from such places as the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her collaborations with composers have been performed and exhibited across the U.S. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Memorious.org.

Opener: Pam Matz

Pam Matz is a poet, librarian, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Memorious, Painted Bride Quarterly, Bloodroot,  and Shadowgraph Quarterly.  She has an MFA from Bennington, is pursuing a master’s in Medieval Studies at the Harvard Extension School, and is grateful to be part of the Boston poetry community.

November 18, 2018
Double Feature: Carol Moldaw and Crystal Williams

Carol Moldaw is the author, most recently, of Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018) as well as five other books of poetry, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010), The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 1998), Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press, 1998), and Taken from the River (Alef Books, 1993). She is also the author of the novel The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008). Moldaw is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly. From 2005-2008 Moldaw was on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency M.F.A. program, and she has conducted residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University. In the spring of 2011 she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University; currently she teaches privately in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives.

Crystal Williams began her career in the arts as an actress, working in Washington, DC. before moving to New York to pursue a career in the arts. Once in New York, she transitioned from theatre to performance and poetry, becoming a regular at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the mid-90s where she earned a spot on the 1995 Nuyorican Slam Team, which competed in the National Slam in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her highly anthologized performance poem, “In Search of Aunt Jemima,” was the only poem of that competition to receive a perfect score and it continues to be regularly performed by new generations of young women more than twenty years later. Williams has published four collections of poems, most recently Detroit as Barn, finalist for the National Poetry Series, Cleveland State Open Book Prize, and the Maine Book Award. Her third collection, Troubled Tongues, was awarded the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award, the Idaho Poetry Prize, and the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. Her first two books, Kin and Lunatic, were published by Michigan State University Press in 2000 and 2002, respectively. Her work has regularly appeared in the nation’s leading journals and magazines, including: American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, PEN: America, The Indiana Review, The Sun, Tin House, Ms. Magazine, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. Most recently, Crystal Williams was one of ten poets commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to write poems as a part of the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series exhibit. Williams was on faculty at Reed College in Portland, Oregon for thirteen years before moving in Fall 2013 to Bates College as a Professor of English and a senior administrator. In October 2017, she joined Boston University as Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion.

December 15, 2018
Double Feature: Lisa Dordal and George Kalogeris

Lisa Dordal, author of Mosaic of the Dark from Black Lawrence Press, teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. A Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, CALYX, Vinyl Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her website is lisadordal.com.

George Kalogeris 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). His poems and translations were anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010). His current book of poems, Guide to Greece, is just out from Louisiana State University Press (2018). He teaches English Literature and Classics in Translation at Suffolk University.

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.

Brookline Poetry Series Co-Directors: Ann Killough, Tam Lin Neville, Susan Jo Russell, Aimée Sands

Contact: poetry@brooklinelibrary.org  Please put “Brookline Poetry Series” in the subject heading. Please do not send written correspondence in care of the Library.