Friday, May 4, 2012

BU MFA poets at the Boston Playwrights' Theater


At 7 PM on May 15, 2012, come to the Boston Playwright's Theater at 949 Commonwealth Avenue, for the final session in the BU MFA poetry reading series, featuring Susan Barba, Mike Brokos, Bryan Coller, Megan Fernandes, L. E. Goldstein, Abriana Jette, Natasha Hakimi, and Kelly Morse. Wine and cheese reception to follow.
 
ABOUT THE READERS

  • Susan Barba is the managing editor at David R. Godine, Publisher/Black Sparrow Books. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, and her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Words Without Borders, and The Yalobusha Review. She has a poem forthcoming in the Hudson Review, and she lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children.
  • Mike Brokos hails from the mid-Atlantic, growing up outside of Baltimore, earning an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Maryland, and living in the Washington, DC area for several years before coming to Boston to work on his MFA in Poetry.
  • Bryan Coller grew up in Southern California where he attended UC Irvine. He studies and teaches creative writing at Boston University.
  • Laura Goldstein is from Niceville, Florida. She finished a creative writing M.A. in August from the University of Southern Mississippi, and is now pursuing her M.F.A in poetry from Boston University.
  • Natasha Hakimi holds both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles.She has received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2010, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction in 2010 and the Falling Leaves Award in 2010. Natasha writes for Los Angeles Magazine and Truthdig and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry at Boston University.
  • Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English Literature at UC Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011) and has two forthcoming chapbooks, Organ Speech (Corrupt Press, November 2011) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press, January 2012). She has also been published in Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale.
  • Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abriana Jette holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Hofstra University. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Boston University where she is a Betsey Leonard Fellow. She is a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, an AWP Intro Journal Project nominee, and teaches at the Boston Academy of Arts.
  • Kelly Morse grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but has since drifted as far as Spain, South Africa and even the East Coast. Most recently, her work has appeared in PoetsArtists and Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi. Kelly is currently working on a series that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between Eastern and Western cultures after a two-year stay in Vietnam.
For more information please visit: http://www.facebook.com/events/323200821086669. This event cross-posted at the Boston Poetry calendar.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Herta Mueller to speak at BU

2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature
Herta Müller

Saturday, May 12, at 4:00 p.m.
Barrister’s Hall, Boston University Law School (behind March Chapel)
765 Commonwealth Avenue

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Herta Müller is the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in 1953 in a German-speaking town in Banat, Romania, where her parents were members of the German-speaking minority. Her father served in the Waffen-SS in World War II, and her mother was deported to a work camp in the Soviet Union in 1945. At university, Ms. Müller opposed the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and joined Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of dissident writers who sought freedom of speech. She emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of persecution and censorship in Romania. Her early works depict village life and the repression its residents face. Her later novels, including "The Land of Green Plums" and "The Appointment", approach allegory in their graphic portrayals of the brutality suffered by modest people living under totalitarianism.

Moderated by Askold Melnyczuk and William Pierce. Melnyczuk is founding editor of AGNI and the author of three novels, most recently "The House of Widows". He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction and the McGinnis Award in Fiction. Pierce’s fiction has appeared in Granta, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He is senior editor of AGNI, where he contributes a series of essays called “Crucibles.”

Sponsored by BU’s Center for the Study of Europe, AGNI and the Goethe Institut Boston.