During March, display cases at the Brookline Village Library will feature books for young people with themes of courage, community, and democracy. Good books are wonderful for introducing readers to people who spoke out for strong communities, to advocates who worked hard on behalf of our government’s founding values, and to people who made their way in unknown territories for a better life for themselves and others. Brookline resident Rusty True Browder (founder of The Children’s Book Shop in Brookline Village and retired Lawrence School librarian) collects and writes about books with themes of a strong democracy and key events in American history, sharing some of them in this display. Visit Rusty’s Substack newsletter for even more book suggestions.
Kids February 2025 Vacation Week Programs
With school break coming up, we’ve got exciting children’s programs at all three Public Library of Brookline locations. We hope you’ll join us to learn, create, and explore! Click on any of the links to visit the event page and learn more about the program.
Tuesday, February 18
Join us for a fun and interactive puppet storytime with Leigh Baltzer from Through Me to You Puppetry. Leigh, Newton, and their puppet friends will share stories and songs, followed by a session of puppet free play. This program is recommended for ages 0-5, but kids and families of all ages are welcome! It will be held in the Coolidge Corner Library Meeting Room at 10:15 AM. Free tickets are required for this program and will be available at 10 AM at the Children’s Desk.
Wednesday, February 19
Experiment with adventure at the Library – help the Science Heroes act out a story about a lost treasure while exploring physical explosions and chemical reactions! This program is recommended for kids ages 5-9 and their families. It will be held in the Coolidge Corner Library Meeting Room at 11 AM. Free tickets are required for this program and will be available at 10:30 AM at the Children’s Desk.
Learn about power, justice, and build imaginary worlds at the Imagining Justice Workshop. This workshop is best for kids ages 7-11 and their families. Space is limited to 15 families on a first-come, first-served basis. This program will be held in the Putterham Library Meeting Room at 2 PM.
Try your hand at four different art styles as you learn about Black illustrators and the work they do. Check out Kids Celebrate Black Artists from 3:30 to 4:30 PM in the Rabbit Hole at the Brookline Village Library. This is a drop-in program for children ages 5-9.
Join us for a fun-filled evening watching the brand new children’s movie The Wild Robot, based on the book of the same name! Recommended for children ages 8 and up. The movie screening will take place in Hunneman Hall at the Brookline Village Library at 6 PM.
Thursday, February 20
Join us and our special guest from the Island of Motunui for a Princess Party in Hunneman Hall at the Brookline Village Library! Listen to stories, dance, and sing with a special princess. Fancy outfits or costumes of any kind are encouraged! This program is best for kids ages 0-5 and their families, though all are welcome. We will host two identical sessions of this program, one at 11 AM and one at 3 PM. Free tickets are required and will be available 30 minutes before each session at the Children’s Desk.
Friday, February 21
Learn how to write and draw comics that will make readers laugh, think, or observe something interesting with comic artist Jonathon Todd in his workshop, Writing and Drawing Comics. This program is best for kids ages 8 and up. A free ticket is required, and can be picked up on a first-come, first-served basis at the Children’s Desk starting at 12:30 PM. It will be held in the Coolidge Corner Library Meeting Room at 1 PM.
Saturday, February 22
Join special performer Matt Heaton for an interactive singalong! This program is for families and kids of all ages, but may be most appealing to kids ages 0-5. It will be held in Hunneman Hall at the Brookline Village Library at 11 AM. Free tickets are required and will be available at the Children’s Desk starting at 10:30 AM.
Join us for Pint Size Yoga with Carol Kagan! Little ones will be guided through stretching, breathing, and age appropriate yoga poses, along with dancing and games. This program is for kids ages 4-6 only! It will be held in the Putterham Library Meeting Room at 11 AM.
Join Susie of the Poop Museum for Gross, Weird, Cool Science! Packed full of amazing examples of grossness, weirdness, and coolness, this is a fast-paced, fact-filled, silly and scientific program. This program is best for kids ages 5-9. It will be held in the Putterham Library Meeting Room at 3 PM.
May 11 – In Person
Jenny Grassl lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Lana Turner Journal, Fairytale Review, and others. Magicholia, her first book, was published by 3: A Taos Press in 2024. Her second book, Forever Mistaken for Ourselves, was chosen for publication by Tupelo Press for their 2024 Open Reading period.
Julia Thacker’s poems have appeared in Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, Pleiades and Poetry International. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her honors include residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Most recently, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount in Lenox. Her collection, To Wildness, winner of the 19th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, will be published by Waywiser Press in 2025. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Eric Braude grew up in South Africa. He won the 27th annual Eagle-Tribune/Robert Frost Foundation Spring Poetry Contest and wrote the front matter poem for the anthology Songs from the Castle’s Remains. His poetry has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Constellations, Apple Valley Review, J Journal. I-70 Review, Panoplyzine, Book of Matches, Frost Meadow Review and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Eric is a computer science professor at Boston University.
April 13 – In Person
Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which, Said Not Said, was published by Graywolf Press and named an Honored Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. His earlier collections include Full Moon Boat, The Looking House, and Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead, a selection of early poems by William Stafford. He is also the co-editor with Jennifer Barber and Jessica Greenbaum of Tree Lines, an anthology of contemporary American poems about trees and forests. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently in Braving the Body, a collection of poems addressing illness and mortality. His poetry and reviews have been published in a wide variety of literary journals, and he has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) the work of several contemporary Vietnamese poets. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, where he founded the university’s Creative Writing Program and Poetry Center. He has taught, and continues to teach, poetry workshops in many venues, both here and abroad.
March 16 – In Person
Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year for 2018 by the New York Times and The Washington Independent Review of Books. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award, the Merringoff Award from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His trilogy of book-length poems, The Mansions, won the National Indie Excellence Award in Poetry and Gold in the Human Relations Indie Book Award in Poetry.
Mary Buchinger, whose recent books include Navigating the Reach (Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award, Salmon Poetry), The Book of Shores, and Virology (Lily Poetry Review Books), is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston.
February 16 – Zoom
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and World Literature Today among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith, and Together in Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Civitella Ranieri, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Major serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review and host of the podcast The Slowdown.
January 19 – Zoom
Head-shot of Gail Mazur
Born in Cambridge, Gail Mazur grew up in Auburndale, Massachusetts. In 1973, she founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Harvard Square, which she ran for 29 years before handing the reins the Andrea Cohen. As an activist with her late husband, the artist Michael Mazur, and others Massachusetts writers and artists, she co-founded, in 1968, Artists Against Racism and the War, and later they fought for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze.. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was for many years Distinguished Senior Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate program and in recent years in Boston University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown . Speaking of Blacksmith House Poetry, now under the direction of poet Andrea Cohen, Mazur has said, “We want to support and validate the work of poets, to make a dent in the isolation writers feel in their working life .” to bring poets from different worlds together.The Blacksmith reading series helps provide something like fellowship; it persists.”
Her first collection, Nightfire, was published in 1978, followed by The Pose of Happiness; The Common; They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award; Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, winner of The Massachusetts Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize; Figures in a Landscape; Forbidden City, and Land’s End: New and Selected Poems, in 2020. Recently she was awarded The Golden Rose for her work from the new England Poetry Society. Her forthcoming collection, Three Trees, will be published next year by the Arrowsmith Press.
Lloyd Schwartz is poet laureate of Somerville, the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a longtime arts critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. He’s published five books of poetry, a collection of his music reviews, and has edited three volumes devoted to the works of Elizabeth Bishop. Among his honors are the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and Academy of American Poets for his poetry. His poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His next collection, “Artur Schnabel and Josepf Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948)” and other poems will appear next year from Arrowsmith Press.
Sign-up for our open mic will start in the chat at 1:45 PM.
Please note that we will also be meeting online in February.
December 15
Brookline Poetry Series December 15 Reading: Cindy Juyoung Ok and Chen Chen
Please note we are online in December, January, and February.
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. A MacDowell Fellow, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award winner, and former high school physics teacher, she is an assistant professor in the University of California, Davis MFA.
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook isExplodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award long list, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.
Celebrating Native American Heritage Month
The Brookline Indigenous Peoples Celebration Committee would like to invite the Brookline Community to visit their specially curated display at the Brookline Village Library acknowledging and celebrating Native American Heritage throughout the month of November.
Gabriele’s art books
Gabriele Dressler is an art teacher and art therapist who moved to Brookline from Germany a little over a year and a half ago. Since moving to Brookline, she has immersed herself in her art, refining her skills at numerous workshops, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, and sharing her art practice with others.
Gabriele has a profound appreciation for the subtle textures of paper and fabric, often finding hidden treasures in the everyday world around her. She delights in the process of recycling and upcycling materials, transforming the overlooked and the discarded into works of art, infusing them with new meaning and purpose.
You can explore more of Gabriele’s artwork on Instagram @gdress18.
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