Salem State poetry seminar from June 5-8

The Salem Poetry Seminar, sponsored by the Salem State Center for Creative and Performing Arts, is a free, week-long seminar, offering students at the Commonwealth's public institutions of higher education the opportunity to study poetry intensively with accomplished teachers and writers. The seminar, to be held June 5-8, will bring 12 young poets together to study, with a "master class" held by acclaimed poet Afaa Michael Weaver. Seminar poetry readings are free and open to the public. This year's reading schedule is as follows:

• Tuesday, June 5, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Theatre Company, 90 Lafayette Street
  Featured Readers: Kevin Carey, Charlotte Gordon
  Student Poets: Steven Durta, Rebecca Mueller, Jacob Reecher, Kayla Russell
• Wednesday, June 6, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street
  Featured Readers: J.D. Scrimgeour, Claire Keyes
  Student Poets: Felicia Connolly, Lillian Donnelly, Emily Hatch, William Regan
• Thursday, June 7, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street
  Salem Poetry Seminar Alumni Reading and Open Mic
• Friday, June 8, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street
  Featured Reader: Afaa Michael Weaver
  Student Poets: Sara Afshar, Ashley De Souza, JD Debski, Lyndon Seitz 

For more information, please contact:
J.D. Scrimgeour, Program Director, jscrimgeour@salemstate.edu, (978) 587-7082
January O'Neil, Project Manager, joneil@salemstate.edu, (978) 239-2598
Karen Gahagan, Salem State Center for the Arts, kgahagan@salemstate.edu, (978) 542-7890

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.

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.

4/25: Poetry reading with Sassan Tabatabai

Tabatabai in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 for the Christian Science Monitor

The public is invited to this free poetry reading, to begin at 6:30 on Wednesday, April 25, 2012, in Room 102 of Gasson Hall at Boston College.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Sassan Tabatabai has lived in the United States since 1980. As a poet and scholar of medieval Persian poetry, he is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry (Leiden University Press, 2010). He teaches humanities and Persian literature at Boston University and Boston College, is Poetry Editor of the literary journal News from the Republic of Letters, and is at present completing a doctorate in editorial studies.

Most recently, Tabatabai is the author of Uzunburun, a collection of poetry and translations published in 2011 by Pen & Anvil Press -- the publishing imprint affiliated with the Boston Poetry Meetup and its parent organization, the Boston Poetry Union.

This event is sponsored by the BC Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literature. RSVP if you wish at Meetup.com.

2012 Cambridge Poetry Jam Marathon

A Poetry Jam hosted by Cambridge Poet Populist Toni Bee, featuring Charles Coe, Sheri J. Fife, Danielle Georges, Regie Gibson, Irene Koronas, Jason Wright, and others. Poetry across various poetic genres will be represented: traditional poetry (11am-noon), multilingual poetry (noon-1pm), slam/spoken word (1-2pm), poetry-music mash-up (2-3pm), and free verse (3-4pm).

FREE and open to the public. For information, please visit http://www.cambridgeartscouncil.org/poetpopulist or call 617-349-4380.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZER
Toni Bee was elected to her position by Cambridge residents in 2011. Her goal as Poet Populist is to celebrate Cambridge’s richly diverse poetry scene by working to fuse the community of poets together through events like the Cambridge Poetry Jam.  Toni Bee was born in Boston from middle-class parents, but ended up single mom and homeless. Now, she works and lives in Cambridge (Area 4). She is a writer, photographer, student at Simmons College, and mother to her ten-year-old daughter.  Toni Bee is a neighbor media journalist at Cambridge Community Television (CCTV). In 2001, she was honored by the YWCA with an “Outstanding Woman” award for her advocacy and commitment to the arts.

Call for Submissions: MOJO

We honor the history of the struggle of Black people in America, but we still want to construct our own notion of Blackness that is separate from that of our parents and grandparents.

--Derek Conrad

Editor Mignon Ariel King has written to ask that we share the news that MoJo! -- an online journal of Black and African-American women's poetry, flash memoir, and social commentary -- is now reading  submissions for the Spring/Summer Issue. Deadline: June 15, 2012. Guidelines and past issues can be found online at http://mapsonehq.wordpress.com/mojo.

NB: If you're active in the Boston literary scene, you may have recognized King's name. In addition to her work with MoJo!, she is also the host of "A Century of Black Voices",  an annual poetry reading celebrating Black History Month; the director of Hidden Charm Press (publisher of small books of poetry and memoir by Black women), and author of the Making Poetry blog.

For updates on MoJo! Writers and other Black poets of New England, follow MoJo! on Facebook.

Call for Submissions: The Poet's Quest for God

The Poet's Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Spirituality
(cross-posted from The Wonder Reflex)

Edited by Dr. Oliver V. Brennan and Dr. Todd Swift
For Publication by Eyewear Publishing 2013-14
Deadline for submission: August 1, 2012

A trimmed version of the call for submissions:

Eyewear Publishing is planning to publish an anthology of new, mostly previously-unpublished poems, written in English, concerned with spiritual issues in this secular age, by persons of any faith, or none. Submissions will be welcomed via email as word documents, containing no more than three poems, and including contact details and a brief 100 word biographical note about the author.

One of the characteristics of our contemporary culture which is generally described as post-modern is the human search for the spiritual. The advent of post-modernity has been accompanied by the dawn of a new spiritual awakening. Many spiritual writers say that desire is our fundamental dis-ease and is always stronger than satisfaction. This desire lies at the centre of our lives, in the deep recesses of the soul. This unquenchable fire residing in all of us manifests itself at key points in the human life cycle. Spirituality is ultimately what we do about that desire. When Plato said that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond and that beyond is trying to draw it back to itself, he is laying out the broad outlines for a spirituality.

This new emphasis on and openness to the spiritual dimension of human existence which is characteristic of contemporary lived culture is accompanied by a new emergence of atheism as well as a sometimes-aggressive secularism. Perhaps the best response to this rage against belief in a Divine Power at work in the universe is a poetic one. 

The purpose of this collection is to awaken debate, create an imaginative discourse and generally open a space for religious poetic practices in the contemporary world, while at the same time refusing to delimit the horizon of the possible.

For more information, or to submit, contact Dr Swift at T.Swift@kingston.ac.uk. I certainly intend to submit, though not in an attitude of resisting secularism. My involvement in secular activism, and my impulses to write and study poetry, are for me two sides of the same coin. I recognize the stone of the world doesn't reveal any message on its surface left by its Maker: not any commandment or token of assurance, no instructions, no threat; and I take that blankness as an invitation to write my own message upon it, and to see what others have written there.

Related reading: Norman Finkelstein's On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry.