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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 the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and 100 Best African American Poems.  His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award.

Watch Jericho Brown read "Prayer of the Backhanded."

Jerry Abelow

Jerry Abelow is a member of The Carpenter Poets of Boston. The Carpenter Poets of Boston are a group of craftsmen and women that met on a large renovation job on a large mansion in Brookline. They started meeting at a local pub Thusday's after work. Stories were told. There was much laughter and spirit. When one of the carpenters brought in a book of Poetry by Mark Turpin, Hammer, a challenge was extended. A date was set. The first reading was a memorable and inspiring event. So started the traditional "Monday after Thanksgiving" reading so no matter where you are working now you can get together with good friends. They published an anthology called "Breaktime" that combined poems from the first few years. A second anthology is being planned.

Jim Kates

Jim Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in poetry and translation, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and several books of translation of French and Russian poetry. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry.

Jim McAllister
Joan Alice Wood Kimball
Joan Kimball

A founder of the Concord Poetry Center, Joan Kimball is a member of the Powow River Poets. She was a finalist for the 2010 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. Her poems have been accepted by Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Measure, Perihelion, The Lyric, Avocet, Thema, Raintown Review, and others including OEDILF, the Online English Dictionary In Limerick Form.

Joanna Nealon

Joanna Nealon, who was a Fulbright Scholar at the Sorbonne in Paris, has published five books with five more awaiting publication. She recites throughout Massachusetts at various venues such as Tapestry of Voices, Whittier Homestead, Stone Soup, and various library series. Since 1992, she has participated in poetry programs at Bay State and Norfolk Prisons."

Joe Bergen

Joe Bergin started writing Carpenter Poetry 20 years ago about a brush with death high on Mexican Tile roof in the blinding Florida sun. He joined up with The Carpenter Poets of Jamaica Plain 10 years ago at James's Gate Tavern and loves trading carpentry war stories and writing versifications for their performances. He self-published a hardcover volume called "Boston Seasons Quartet: Politics, Art, Sports and Weather" about his beloved city. Joe Bergen is a member of The Carpenter Poets of Boston. The Carpenter Poets of Boston are a group of craftsmen and women that met on a large renovation job on a large mansion in Brookline. They started meeting at a local pub Thusday's after work. Stories were told. There was much laughter and spirit. When one of the carpenters brought in a book of Poetry by Mark Turpin, Hammer, a challenge was extended. A date was set. The first reading was a memorable and inspiring event. So started the traditional "Monday after Thanksgiving" reading so no matter where you are working now you can get together with good friends. They published an anthology called "Breaktime" that combined poems from the first few years. A second anthology is being planned.

John Canaday

John Canaday’s first book of poems, The Invisible World, won the 2001 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of a critical study, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Raritan, Slate, The Hudson Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among other journals and anthologies. He is currently completing a book of poems in the voices of the men and women involved in the Manhattan Project.

John Murillo

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. His choreo-play, Trigger, has been commissioned by Edgeworks Dance Theater and is scheduled for production in spring 2011. A founding member of the poetry collective, The Symphony, he has taught at New York University, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell University.

John Payne

John Payne is a member of The Carpenter Poets of Boston. The Carpenter Poets of Boston are a group of craftsmen and women that met on a large renovation job on a large mansion in Brookline. They started meeting at a local pub Thusday's after work. Stories were told. There was much laughter and spirit. When one of the carpenters brought in a book of Poetry by Mark Turpin, Hammer, a challenge was extended. A date was set. The first reading was a memorable and inspiring event. So started the traditional "Monday after Thanksgiving" reading so no matter where you are working now you can get together with good friends. They published an anthology called "Breaktime" that combined poems from the first few years. A second anthology is being planned.

John Tavano

John Tavano is a Classical Guitarist experienced in many styles of performing techniques including repertoire from the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Spanish Flamenco, and the styles of Latin America. John has twenty five years of experience performing concerts; he also performs in clubs and restaurants throughout New England. Throughout his career he has performed at numerous special events including weddings, anniversary and engagement parties, as well as Renaissance festivals. John is a staff musician at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a member of the North Shore Musicians Association, and a classical guitar instructor in Haverhill and Newburyport Massachusetts. John currently has two CDs. La Gitana was released in 2003, which features eight original compositions in the Latin/Samba ensemble tradition, plus music by Bach and Eric Satie. Avila was released in 2005. It contains a mix of original compositions and Romantic pieces.

Joseph O. Legaspi

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press), winner of a Global Filipino Literary Award. He lives in Queens, NY and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, his poems appeared and/or are forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, From the Fishouse, jubilat, World Literature Today, PEN International, Smartish Pace, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, The Normal School, and the anthologies Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton) and Tilting the Continent (New Rivers Press). A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a nonprofit organization serving Asian American poetry. Visit him at www.josepholegaspi.com.

Julie Batten

After winning awards for her writing in college, Julie Batten headed to New York to work for Conde Nast Publications and later, Time, Inc. She was forced to drop out of New York University’s MFA program when fate, her father’s death (and a subsequently homeless brother), intervened. Twenty some years and four kids later, she’s picking up where she left off. With an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars, a book of poetry, a growing short story collection and a novel under way, she has recently won a fellowship in fiction from the SLS Unified Literary Contest and was a finalist in the Bluecat Screenwriting Written Pitch Contest. Stay tuned…

Karen Klein
Kat Good-Schiff

Kat Good-Schiff is an editor, copywriter, and poet whose work has appeared in Pank, Twelve Stories, and other journals as well as art books, cards, and installations.

Kathleen Spivack

Kathleen Spivack's recent book, A History of Yearning, won the Sow's Ear International Poetry Prize 2010, the London Book Festival, and was first runner up in the New England Book Festival. She has published seven books of poetry and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, and others. Her poems have also been featured in numerous anthologies.

Katie Peterson

Katie Peterson teaches literature at Bennington College. Next year, she will be Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in 2009 - 2010. In 2010 she received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her book of poems, This One Tree, was published by New Issues in 2006.

Keith Leonard

Keith Leonard is an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where he serves as poetry editor of Indiana Review. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize, Keith’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Laurel Review, Quarterly West, Sentence and Wild Apples.

Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY teaches Writing at Salem State College and coaches basketball at The Glen Urquhart School in Beverly, Mass. Recent publications include: The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Zeus Anthology, Still Waters: Crime Stories by New England Writers, and The White Pelican Review, where his poem, “Shredding Me,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Kim Richey

Intimacy has always been a hallmark of Kim Richey’s music. A lover who apologizes that their hesitancy in committing to a relationship is hurting their loved one. A magical, middle-of- the-night walk in a snowbound city where the protagonist wants to keep the mood while worrying that the enchantment might end. A person leaving the home that they’ve shared with a loved one, melancholy yet hopeful of happier times ahead. These are only some of the vignettes that Richey brings to life with masterful attention to emotional detail on her sixth and latest album Wreck Your Wheels. The two-time Grammy-nominated Richey is a storyteller par excellence; famed critic Timothy White said about Richey that she “entices you with sad and unembellished music that reveals an original spirit - and then she ensnares you for keeps by making you consider all the noiseless sensations that no songs can ever contain." Her music is tender, poetic and aching with life's truths. And then there's her voice. Pure, arresting and honest, her voice is a perfect instrument with which to paint these intimate pictures.

Kim Triedman

Kim Triedman's poems have been published widely, and she was nominated for the anthologies Best New Poets 2009 and Best of the Web 2010. Her first poetry collection—bathe in it or sleep—was published by Main Street Rag in October of 2008. She won the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition and the 2010 Ibbetson Street Poetry Award. She also co-organized a poetry reading with Jim Henle of Harvard to benefit the people of Haiti, and edited Poets for Haiti: An Anthology of Poetry and Art.

KL Pereira

KL Pereira teaches at Grub Street and coaches writers in the Boston area. Her work has been published in The Medulla Review, Jabberwocky, Bitch, and other fine publications.

Kristine Doll

Dr. Kristine Doll is a former Chairperson and professor of Foreign Languages at Salem State University. She has published numerous scholarly articles on poetry, translation, and language acquisition and has read her translations at many international poetrt festivals. Her latest book, Joan Alcover: Elegies, is a collection of poetry translations from Catalan to English. Her forthcoming book is a translation of August Bover's Catalan verse into English.

Lainie Senechal

Lainie Senechal is a poet, painter, and environmental science teacher.. She has had over 75 poems published in various publications including Dasoku, The Larcom Review, Spare Change, The Aurorean (featured poet 2002), Ibbetson Street, Wilderness House Literary Review,and the South Boston Literary Gazette , and four anthologies, as well. She has been the featured poet at many venues throughout New England, most recently at the Boston National Poetry Month Festival. She has a new collection, Vocabulary of Awakening, (Pudding House, 2009) and has co-authored two volumes of poetry: Chalice of Eros, with Harris Gardner, and Naiad’s Lantern, with her sisters.

Laura Healy

Laura Healy is the translator of two collections of poetry by Roberto Bolaño: The Romantic Dogs (New Directions, 2008) and Tres (New Directions, 2011). She lives in Providence and works as managing editor of Harvard Review and web editor of Zoland Poetry.

Lauren Wolk

Lauren Wolk is a poet, artist and  novelist. Lauren is a member of Bass River Revisionists, a poetry workshop on Cape Cod, which began in the early 1980s.  Her poems have been published in Nimrod International Journal, received an Honorable Mention in the Pablo Neruda Poetry Competition, and in the anthology, A Sense of Place, as well as in several journals. Lauren has organized a collaborative exhibit of 45 poets and artists, Mutual Muses, for the past four years, at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, South Yarmouth, MA, where she is Associate Director.

Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize for his poem “Angelus.” His poetry has been accepted for publication by Poetry, Ireland Review, Cream City Review, Atlanta Review, Chronogram, Ibbetson Street, Word Riot, Verse Wisconsin, Ekleksographia, and other magazines. His chapbook Strange News was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008.

Lawrence Rungren
Leah Nielsen
Leslie Harrison

Leslie Harrison's first book of Poems is Displacement, out in 2009 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She was the 2010 Philip Roth Resident in Poetry at Bucknell University and holds a 2011 Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Sandisfield with her two rescued Boston Terriers.

Leslie Williams

Leslie Williams' first book, Success of the Seed Plants, won the 2010 Bellday Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Robert H. Winner Award and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and in many other magazines. A North Carolina native, she lives in Newton with her husband and two sons.

Linda McCarriston

Linda McCarriston is a native of Lynn, MA and now lives in Gloucester. Her three books of poems include Eva-Mary, winner of the Terrence des Pres Prize from Northwestern University’s TriQuarterly Press and then short-listed for the National Book Award. This work has been featured in interviews with Terry Gross and for Bill Moyers’ PBS series, The Language of Life. McCarriston has been the poetry fellow at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute), Jenny Moore Visiting Writer in Washington, D.C., and the recipient of two fellowship grants from the NEA and two from the Vermont Council on the Arts. Since 1994 she has been a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She’s working on a book called Class-Colored Glasses.

Linwood Rumney

Linwood Rumney, who completed an MFA in poetry at Emerson College last year, is a 2010 recipient of a fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Carolina Quarterly, Potomac Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Quercus Review, among others. He recently completed a stint as the poetry editor of Redivider. He teaches writing in Boston.

Lloyd Schwartz

Lloyd Schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular commentator for NPR's Fresh Air. His most recent book of poems is Cairo Traffic (U of Chicago). His Elizabeth Bishop editions include "Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters" (Library of America) and "Elizabeth Bishop: Prose" (FSG). His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Poetry. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of one book of poetry, Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011), and serves as co-curator for louderARTS: the Reading Series and Page Meets Stage, both in New York City. For more information, please visit www.memali.com

Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell

MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and has been a recipient of a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. She won the 1993 Grolier Prize for Poetry. Her poetry collection, Crossroads and Unholy Water, won the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize. Her collection The Company of Heaven—Stories from Haiti just won the Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press.

Mark Doty

Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of six books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (2005), HarperCollins. In 2008, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published, and won the National Book Award for 2008. He is the author of three memoirs: Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007), as well as The Art of Description: World Into Word, a volume in the popular "Art of" series, a line of books intended to reinvigorate the practice of craft and criticism. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001). Among his many awards are two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty was recently elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Gerald Stern says of him, "Mark Doty writes with absolute exactitude, with one eye on the ideal or absolute and one on the real; the ghost of Walt Whitman on one hand, and a laundromat on 16th Street in New York, on the other. There is not a finer, more delicate, more sublime poet writing today in the English language. It's a poet's job to show us what we knew but never saw before; and it's a poet's job to tell us over and over what love is. Doty is this poet." Doty teaches at Rutgers University, and is a frequent guest at Columbia University, Hunter College, and NYU. He lives in Houston and in New York City.

Mark Schafer

Mark Schafer is a translator of the works The Scale of Maps, a novel by the Spanish author Belén Gopegui, which Publishers Weekly called “beautifully composed and elegantly translated.” He specializes in the translation of Latin American literature, including poetry by David Huerta and Gloria Gervitz and fiction by Virgilio Piñera, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, and Jesús Gardea. Schafer has received numerous grants and awards for his translations, including two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a lecturer in Spanish at the UMass Boston and is a visual artist who reassembles maps to create new geographies. His translation and map art website is www.beforesaying.com.

Mark Wagner

Mark Wagner is celebrating the publication of his chapbook, Home Building (Finishing Line Press, 2011) Home Building is Wagner's second book of poetry. In this first, A Cabin in a Field (Mellen, 2001), he wrote about a project in which he and Monica Elefterion, and now their son Myles, cleared and made a home in a barn on the last bit of a once large dairy farm in south central Massachusetts. Home Building continues an exploration in poetry of some elements to their lives as they try to grow a bit of their food and otherwise preserve a little bit of the landscape as it was. Wagner also has published a work of philosophy-The Immediate Field (Verlag, 2010) - and a book of essays and photographs - Silkheads (Homestead, 1997) -- about living with alopecia, which Hippocrates called 'the disease of the fox.' An avid musician, Wagner wrote the music for a revival of Charles Olson's dance-play, Apollonius of Tyana.

Martin Edmunds
Matt Swift

Matthew Swift is a Samuel Beckett scholar, interdisciplinary Modernist, and birder with old roots and a new family in that special place, Gloucester.

Mayor Kimberley Driscoll
Meg Campbell

Meg Campbell is the author of Solo Crossing (Midmarch Arts Press, 3rd printing), and editor of Split Verse: Poems to Heal Your Heart (Midmarch Arts Press). She has been invited to read her poetry at Dodge Festival, The Tattered Cover in Denver and numerous other venues. She is founder and Executive Director of Codman Academy Charter Public School in Dorchester, where she resides.

Melanie Braverman

Melanie Braverman is the author of the novel East Justice (Permanent Press, 1996) and the poetry collection Red (Perugia Press, 2002), winner of the Publishers Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Prize. She is Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Melissa J. Varnavas

Melissa J. Varnavas is a a graduate of the Pine Manor College Solstice MFA program, writer/editor at HCPro, Inc., in Danvers, MA, and former editor of the Beverly Citizen newspaper. She has won several journalism awards from the Suburban Newspapers of America, the New England Press Association, the Massachusetts Press Association, among others. Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oberon and Margie.

Michael Mack

After serving in the US Air Force as an aircraft crew chief, Michael Mack worked a variety of factory and labor jobs before returning to school and graduating from the Writing Program at MIT. Mack has performed at the US Library of Congress, Yale University, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Columbia Festival of the Arts, and many other venues. His work has aired on NPR, and has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cumberland Poetry Review, and is featured in Best Catholic Writing 2005 and 2007.

Mike Young

Mike Young is the author of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, a book of poems, and Look! Look! Feathers, a book of stories. His poems and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, LIT, BOMB, Washington Square Review, Nerve and others. He is a graduate of the UMass-Amherst Poets and Writers MFA Program. He writes for HTMLGIANT, co-edits NOÖ Journal, and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Find him online at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com.

Miriam Margala

Miriam Margala is currently writing her dissertation addressing the intertwining web of issues on translation, translators, authors and creativity. She has taught courses on translation, multiculturalism and other linguistics related topics. She has translated a wide range of texts to and/or from English, Czech and Slovak. Her recent translation project is a short collection of poems which will be published in Europe as a bilingual edition (English-Slovak). Currently, she is a visiting lecturer at U Mass Lowell.

Molly Lynn Watt

Molly Lynn Watt is the curator of Fireside Readings Series, she chairs the Poetry Panel for HILR Literary Review and 2010 HILR Poet Laureate. She was editor of the first four BagelBard Anthologies, Ibbetson Street Press published her book, Shadow People, in 2007. She is currently finishing a poetry manuscript, On the Wings of Song, set in the Civil Rights Movement 1963.

Nancy K. Pearson

Nancy K. Pearson's first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light, won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her book was selected as a Must-Read from the 9th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Pearson has received numerous fellowships and awards including a 2010 grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, she now lives on Cape Cod with her partner.

Pam Bernard

Pam Bernard's awards include an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, two Mass Cultural Council Fellowships, the Grolier Prize in Poetry, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She has published three full-length collections of poems, the latest of which is a series of poetic narratives about the Great War, entitled BLOOD GARDEN: AN ELEGY FOR RAYMOND. She lives in Walpole, New Hampshire.

Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith, lauded by critics as “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” is the author of five acclaimed poetry volumes. Blood Dazzler, which chronicles the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. In a review, South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Wentworth wrote, “Blood Dazzler is the narrative of a shameful tragedy, but it is lyrical and beautiful, like a hymn we want to sing over and over until it lives in our collective memory.” In naming the book one of NPR’s Top 5 books of 2008, John Freeman called Dazzler “a fierce, blood-in-the-mouth collection” which “already has the whiff and feel of folklore.” Smith’s previous book, Teahouse of the Almighty, was a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the first-ever Hurston/Wright Award in Poetry. Her other poetry books are Close to Death, Life According to Motown, and Big Towns, Big Talk. She is the winner of the Chatauqua Literary Journal Award in poetry and a Pushcart Prize for the poem “The Way Pilots Walk.” Smith's work has been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other literary journals/anthologies, and performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center, the Sorbonne in Paris and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam —the most successful slammer in the competition’s history--Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman plays, one produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. In addition to her poetic works, Smith is also the author of Africans in America, a companion volume to the groundbreaking PBS documentary; Publishers Weekly called the book “a monumental research effort wed with fine writing…ultimately shaped by Smith’s beautiful narrative,” and Michelle Cliff of the San Jose Mercury News said, “With its vivid language and historical integrity, ‘Africans in America’ is a major contribution to this country’s written history.” Smith also penned the children’s book Janna and the Kings, which won Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Award. She has served as a Cave Canem faculty member, a Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University, and writer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. During a ceremony at Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center, Smith was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. In 2008 she was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas. She is currently at work on Shoulda Been Jimmie Savannah, a memoir written in formal verse; the young adult novel The Journey of Willie J, and a Blood Dazzler collaboration with Paloma McGregor, a choreographer with Urban Bush Women. Smith teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine and is a professor of creative writing at the City University of New York/ College of Staten Island. She has also done hundreds of writing and performance residencies in elementary middle schools and high schools.

Patrick Donnelly

PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of THE CHARGE (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and NOCTURNES OF THE BROTHEL OF RUIN, forthcoming from Four Way Books in spring 2012. He is an Associate Editor of POETRY INTERNATIONAL, and Director of the Advanced Seminar at The Frost Place. He has taught at Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and many other journals. With Stephen D. Miller he translates classical Japanese poetry and drama; their translations have appeared in many journals, including Bateau, Circumference, Metamorphoses and New Plains Review.

Patrick Sylvain

PATRICK SYLVAIN is a Haitian Language Instructor at Brown University and a Language Coach at Harvard. He received his Masters in Education from Harvard in 1998. He has been published in numerous anthologies and journals, including: African American Review, Agni, American Poetry Anthology, American Poetry Review, The Best of Beacon, 1999, The Butterfly’s Way, Callaloo, Caribbean Writers, Confrontation, Crab Orchard Review, Haitian Times, Massachusetts Review, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, and Ploughshares. His latest bilingual poetry collection is Love, Lust & Loss.

Pete Negroponte

Born and raised in downtown New York, percussionist/improviser Peter Negroponte has worked with artists such as Anthony Coleman and Sean Lennon. He has always had a hard time distinguishing left from right, and most likely always will.

Phil Kaye

Hailing from Southern California, Phil Kaye has been writing, performing and teaching Spoken Word Poetry since he was seventeen years old. Named “The Illest Collegiate Poet in the Northeast” by Brandeis University, Phil has performed around the country and shared the stage with such poetry legends as Anis Mojgani, Derrick Brown, and Amir Sulaiman. In 2010 alone, Phil was a semifinalist at the National Poetry Slam, a semifinalist the College National Poetry Slam (where he was specially awarded for “Pushing the Art Forward”), a competitor at the Individual World Poetry Slam and the top ranked poet of both Brown University and Rhode Island. Phil's first book of poetry “A Lightbulb Symphony” was published in January of 2011, and his work can regularly be found in CHAOS Magazine. Phil has been the keynote speaker and performer at MassSTAR, the Massachusetts Department of Education's youth leadership conference, and is also the creator of "Beyond Color" – a Southern California lecture series that explores the deep roots of racism and marginalization in modern society. A performer, writer and teacher, Phil has had experience all over the nation, from performing in the famous Fitzgerald Theater to teaching weekly workshops to Maximum Security Inmates.

Purvi Shah

Purvi Shah’s debut book of poems, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), which explores migration as potential and loss, won the Many Voices Project prize and was nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award in 2007. Shah, who holds an MA in American Literature from Rutgers University, is a former poetry editor of the Asian Pacific American Journal and the recipient of a Virginia Voss Poetry Award from the University of Michigan. Born in Ahmedabad, India, Shah lives in New York City, where she recently served for seven and a half years as the executive director at Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based anti–domestic violence organization. She is currently consulting on the issue of violence against women, supporting the development of Kundiman (an Asian American poets organization), teaching literature courses at Hunter College, and working toward a second collection of poetry.

R. Joyce Heon

Great grandmother R. Joyce Heon is currently studying French with the intention of writing poems in French. She wonders how the absence of diacritics in her name will impact on her success. Others suggest that that is the least of her problems.

Raffael de Gruttola

Raffael de Gruttola is past president of the Haiku Society of America and a founding member of the Boston Haiku Society. His haiku, haiga (haiku painting) tanka, and renku (linked verse) have appeared throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. His haiga collaborations with painters Wilfred Croteau and Peggy McClure can be seen on: www.reedscontemporaryhaiga.com and a renku performance piece on www.vimeo.com//10998813

Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat, one of the world's oldest electronic journals of the arts, and Co-Director of Creative Writing at Central Connecticut State University. He has published five other books and chapbooks. Along with Tina Chang and Natalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton's "Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond," called "a beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts grant, appeared in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and has performed his work around the world, including on NPR and on the BBC. He currently teaches in Fairfield University's MFA Program and in the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank’s first book, Little Murders Everywhere, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, and her poems have appeared in such places as Guernica, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and Best New Poets 2008. She is editor-in-chief and co- founder of the online magazine Memorious.org.

Regie Gibson

Former National Poetry Slam Champion Regie Gibson received his MFA from New England College. He’s lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba and Europe– most recently at Teatro Binario 7 in Milan, Italy. In 2008 as a representative of the U.S., Regie competed for and received the Absolute Poetry Award in Monfalcone, Italy. Himself and his work appear in "love jones” a feature-film based on events in his life. He’s been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, various NPR programs, and nominated for a Boston Emmy. He’s a recipient of both the Walker Scholarship for poetry from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and a YMCA Writer’s fellowship. He’s been published in Poetry Magazine, Harvard’s Divinity Magazine and The Iowa Review among others. His volume of poems “Storms Beneath the Skin” received the Golden Pen Award. In 2010 Regie received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Poetry and the 2010-11 Lexington Education Foundation Program Grant. He performs regularly with his literary music ensemble Neon JuJu.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Dominican by birth, Rhina Espaillat writes and publishes poetry, short stories and essays in both English and Spanish, and translates in both directions. She has published eight full-length books and three chapbooks, and has won several national and international awards. Her most recent publication is Her Place in These Designs, a poetry collection.

Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is author of three poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award, and the forthcoming Emblem, as well as Half the House: a Memoir, and Interference & Other Stories. He teaches at Emerson College, and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.

Robert Gibbons

Robert Gibbons is the author of six full-length books of prose poetry. In the introduction to his latest book, Jagged Timeline, published in Denmark, and translated into Danish, Bent Sørensen writes, “Robert Gibbons is one of the finest practitioners of prose poetry in the US today. Gibbons’ America is one of outsiders, peopled with human beings from every corner of the globe. His curiosity allows him to hear their stories, to compare their worlds with his, and through his writing he gives us the same chance.” As Poetry & Fiction Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Janus Head, he has published work by Fanny Howe, Pattiann Rogers, Robert Bly, William Heyen, Jerome Rothenberg, and translations of Celan, Neruda, Tranströmer, and Vallejo. British scholar, Ben Bollig, wrote, “I met the American poet Robert Gibbons at a conference in Stirling, Scotland, last summer: he is the most passionate advocate of poetry I have met, and as one who earns a living mostly talking and writing about poetry, I cannot but value this all too rare quality.”

Rosann Kozlowski

2010 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, she received her MFA from Vermont College and currently teaches English and Creative Writing in the Massachusetts public school system and Bridgewater State University.

Ruth Lepson

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. In recent years she has been collaborating with musicians. Another of her groups is low road, with Noah Preminger on bass & Eric Lane on keyboard. Her books are I Went Looking for You, Morphology (both from blazevox) & Dreaming in Color (Alice James Books) & she edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (U of Illinois Press). Her poems have been in EOAGH, Carve, Shampoo, Big Bridge, Jacket and many other periodicals. She organized poetry readings for Oxfam America.

Sandra Kohler

Sandra Kohler’s third book of poems, Improbable Music, is to be published in May, 2011 by Word Press. Her two previous collections are The Ceremonies of Longing, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2003 and The Country of Women, Calyx, 1995. Her poems have appeared in periodicals, including The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, for the past thirty-five years. She’s taught literature and writing in venues ranging from elementary school to university. A resident of Pennsylvania for most of her adult life, she moved to Dorchester in 2006.

Sarah Eide

Sarah Eide is an accomplished musician and composer, having scored films for various independent directors (most notably In Medias Res, the indie feature film of LA based Strange Bela Productions). She's written music for the lyric sequence Fishwife Tales (by poet Jennifer Jean), she is the assistant conductor of the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra, has written music for Kazira LLC's newest videogame "AdLibs," and co-founded and organized Culturehouse, a Boston-based concert series that brings local non-profits and bands together to create community based on social awareness through music. Eide is the recipient of the 2011 ASCAP award and has been featured at the 2011 Women Musicians Network Annual Concert. For more on Sarah Eide go to: www.saraheide.com.

Sarah Kay

Sarah Kay is a Spoken Word Poet who grew up in New York City and began performing her poetry when she was only fourteen years old. Even though she was often the youngest poet by a decade, Sarah made herself at home at the Bowery Poetry Club, one of New York's most famous Spoken Word venues. In 2006, she joined the Bowery Poetry Club's Poetry Slam Team, NYC Urbana, and competed in the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. That year, she was the youngest poet competing at Nationals. Sarah was featured on the sixth season of the television series Russell Simmons presents HBO Def Poetry Jam, where she performed her poem "Hands." She has performed in venues across the country including the United Nations, where she was a featured performer for the launch of the 2004 World Youth Report. She has also performed internationally in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, India, and South Africa. Sarah is a published author, whose work can be found in literary publications such as Foundling Review, Damselfly Press, decomP, among others. In 2004, Sarah founded Project V.O.I.C.E. and has since taught Spoken Word Poetry in classrooms and workshops all over the world, to students of all ages. Most recently, Sarah was a featured speaker at the 2011 TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) on "The Rediscovery of Wonder" in Long Beach, California

Sarah Slifer

Sarah Slifer is a dance artist based in Gloucester, MA. Her work includes set choreography, site-specific work, improvisation, and performance installations. She has performed with the Maida Withers Dance Construction Company, Vincent Cacialano, Anno Dijkstra, The White Box Project, and Caitlin Corbett Dance Company. She teaches dance at Salem State University, Liza Indiciani School of Dance, and Gene Murray School. In 2005 she founded the Gloucester New Arts Festival, which showcased contemporary art and performance in outdoor or industrial spaces. Sarah is a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow for Choreography.

Sarah Smith

Sarah Smith has been on faculty at Montserrat College of Art for 11 years where she is the director of the Book Arts program and the manager of Imposition Press. Imposition Press is the creative letterpress printing and printmaking initiative of Montserrat College of Art. It supplements and supports studio courses and activity in the book arts and printmaking at the College; contributes to the Montserrat experience as a center for fine and adventurous printing; enables student and other artists, designers and writers to pursue work in this area; and provides a means for collaborations with artists and Montserrat faculty. Broadsides of the poems featured in Common Threads were printed by Imposition Press.

Sharon Howell

Sharon Howell is from Acton, MA, and currently lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge. She is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University, and the Dean of Adams House in Harvard College. Her work has previously appeared in the Notre Dame Review, the Colorado Review, and Johns Hopkins' Spiritus, and she has two books forthcoming in 2011: Girl in Everytime (Pressed Wafer Press) and It Will Miss You (Ilora Press).

Simeon Berry

Simeon Berry has received a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters and a Mass Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. His work has appeared in CRAZY HORSE, AGNI, COLORADO REVIEW, the IOWA REVIEW, AMERICAN LETTERS AND COMMENTARY, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor at PLOUGHSHARES and on the board of directors at SALAMANDER.

Simon Hanes

Simon Hanes, member of Box Lunch, is a painfully unschooled bass player studying in the contemporary improvisation department at NEC under Anthony Coleman. Raised in the Bay Area, Simon has played with the likes of Grant Calvin Westin, Henry Kaiser, and Weasel Walter among others, and was (marginally) involved in the Oakland/Berkeley punk scene. Simon is also a member of the other Boston-based bands Guerilla Toss, Merryville Grammer School, and Elbow Room.

Simone Beaubian
Sonia Coman
Stacy Thomas-Vickory

Stacy Thomas-Vickory has been on faculty at Montserrat College of Art for 10 years. She is the Chair of the Printmaking department.

State Rep. John Keenan
Stephen Sturgeon

Stephen Sturgeon is the author of Trees of the Twentieth Century, published this month by Dark Sky Books. His poems have appeared in Jacket, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He is editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.

Steve Almond

Steve Almond is the author of half a dozen books and thousands of bad poems. In October of 2011, Lookout Books will publish his new story collection, God Bless America.

Susan Donnelly

Susan Donnelly is the author of the Morse Prize winning volume Eve Names the Animals, (Northeastern University); Transit (Iris press) and three chapbooks. Her third poetry collection, Capture the Flag, will be published in fall 2009 by Iris Press.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Sun, and many other journals, textbooks and anthologies. Featured twice on Garrison Keillor’s “Poet's Almanac,” Susan was a winner in a New York Times Iraq War poems contest and has poems on several online sites. Susan founded Every Other Thursday, a poetry workshop, in 1980 and consults and teaches poetry from her home in Cambridge, MA.

Susan Kan

Susan Kan is founder and director of Perugia Press, an independent nonprofit poetry press publishing first and second books of poetry by women since 1997. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College, and also offers individual manuscript reviews.

Susan Rich

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World, Cures Include Travel, and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. She has received awards from PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement, and Peace Corps Writers. Her fellowships include an Artists Trust Fellowship from Washington State and a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa. She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia Herzegovina, and a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. Rich lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship.Her poems have been published in the Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Northwest Review, Poetry International and The Southern Review. Anthologized poems and essays are included in Best Essays of the Northwest, Poets of the American West, Poem Home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Human Rights, Poem Revised: 54 Poems, and The Working Poet: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises. Susan is an alumna of Hedgebrook, the Helen Whiteley Center and the Ucross Foundation. She serves on the boards of Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Press and Whit Press. Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, and the University of Oregon, Susan Rich lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline Community College where she runs the reading series, Highline Listens: Writers Read Their Work.

Susan Roberts

Susan Roberts teaches at Boston College. She has published poetry in American, Canadian, and Irish journals, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She directs the Brookline Poetry Series.

Teresa Cader

Teresa Cader is the author of three collections of poetry, Guests, The Paper Wasp, and History of Hurricanes, published in 2009. Her awards include the Norma Farber First Book Award and the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Journal Award in Poetry, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and three fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. She has also taught at MIT, Emerson College and Umass-Boston. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Magazine, Harvard Review, Slate, AGNI, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Legacy Project, and Field.

Teresa Carson

Teresa Carson is the Development Director for CavanKerry Press. Her first book of poems, Elegy for the Floater, was published in 2008. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College.

Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Review, the Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, Memorious, and The New Yorker. She just finished her term as the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident in Lenox, Massachusetts.

The Poetry Dress
Tom Sexton

Tom Sexton: “From East to West to East: One Poet’s Journey” Tom Sexton earned a Master’s in Fine Arts at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and went on to establish and chair the MFA program at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, teaching there until his retirement in 1994. He was also a founding editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review in 1981. In 1995, the Alaska State Legislature appointed him poet laureate of Alaska. Sexton was a 1958 graduate of Lowell High School and in 2006 was named a member of the Lowell High School Distinguished Alumni. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Jack Kerouac, samples of Tom’s poetry are exhibited on signage along the Concord River walkway in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Sexton is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets (University of Alaska Press, 2011), For the Sake of the Light (University of Alaska Press, 2009), and Crows on Black Branches (Chester Creek Press, 2008).

Valerie Duff

Valerie Duff, SALAMANDER's poetry editor, is the author of the collection TO THE NEW WORLD. She has received St. Botolph and Mass Cultural Council grants for her poetry. Her poems have appeared in PLOUGHSHARES, HARVARD REVIEW, PN REVIEW, AGNI, and ZOLAND POETRY: AN ANNUAL OF POEMS, TRANSLATIONS AND INTERVIEWS. She lives in Belmont, MA.

Various
Vincent Dorio

Vincent Dorio is a member of The Carpenter Poets of Boston. The Carpenter Poets of Boston are a group of craftsmen and women that met on a large renovation job on a large mansion in Brookline. They started meeting at a local pub Thusday's after work. Stories were told. There was much laughter and spirit. When one of the carpenters brought in a book of Poetry by Mark Turpin, Hammer, a challenge was extended. A date was set. The first reading was a memorable and inspiring event. So started the traditional "Monday after Thanksgiving" reading so no matter where you are working now you can get together with good friends. They published an anthology called "Breaktime" that combined poems from the first few years. A second anthology is being planned.

Walter Howard
Wes (Mongo) Jolley

Wess Mongo Jolley is a poet and poetry promoter living in Vermont. He produces and hosts the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel podcast (http://performancepoetry.indiefeed.com). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Off The Coast, PANK, The New Verse News, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, The Legendary, decomP, and in the Write Bloody Press book The Good Things About America. He lives on a ten acre parcel in rural Vermont, with his partner, various members of his clan, a failing vegetable garden, and an unidentified monster that has been known to chase visitors out of the woods if they dare to venture too far from the light. He is an urban poet, trapped in a rural body. He can be found on the internet at http://mongopoet.com, and at mongo@indiefeed.com

X.J. Kennedy

X.J. Kennedy, of Lexington, has been writing schoolbooks and other things (including a lot of poetry) for a living the past 30 years. He is the author of Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New & Selected Poems (a 2008 ALA Notable Book) and 20 books for children-- the latest is City Kids. His work received the Robert Frost medal of the Poetry Society of America in 2009.

Yim Tan Wong

Yim Tan Wong graduated from the MFA program at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA, where she earned a teaching fellowship and won The Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize. She has been a Kundiman Emerging Asian American Poets Fellow and currently supports her writing habit by working a steady job at a Boston hospital. Her interviews, articles, and poems have appeared in City Magazine (Roanoke, VA), jacket (Australia), Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Packingtown Review, Freshwater Review, Santa Clara Review, Margie, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Yim Tan recently completed her first book, a series of poems that serve as sleep and dream study reports, and she has begun work on her second book in conversation with the paintings of Rene Magritte, the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and whomever else she meets along the way.