Sunday, December 11th, 6pm

At the Blarney Stone, 1505 Dorchester Avenue.   Walking directions from Fields Corner Station on the Red (Ashmont) Line.

Readers:

Morie Deykute is a first-year MFA Poetry student at UMass Boston. After leaving Russia at the age of 12, Morie has lived in Brooklyn, Montreal and Santa Fe, scribbling all the while. At the moment Morie teaches kindergarten, reads compulsively and writes poems. She is obsessed with displacement, the magic of language, and the impending nature of Northeastern winters. 

Johnny Diaz is a staff writer for The Boston Globe's Business section, where he writes about local TV news, radio, and advertising (and whatever stories his editors throw his way).  He's also the author of four gay-themed novels: Boston Boys Club, Miami Manhunt, Beantown Cubans and the newly published, Take The Lead. On his downtime, the Dorchester resident enjoys hiking in the Blue Hills, reading People magazine and walking around downtown Providence (the setting for his fifth book).

Aaron Devine is a writer and Spanish-English translator originally from St. Louis Park, Minnesota. He’s a 2^nd year student of fiction in the UMass-Boston MFA program.  Aaron has juggled atop Masada (Israel), Machu Picchu (Peru) and Savin Hill (Dorchester). He lives in Savin Hill.

Christopher Kain: I discovered reading poetry out loud while I was a junior at UMass Amherst twenty years ago. After graduation, I moved to Cincinnati, OH, where I performed at a Borders Books & Music as well as an open folk mic. I then moved to Washington, DC, where my work was anthologized in publications by the Federal Poets as well as the Live Poets Society. After a slight snag of finances, I moved in with the parents in CT & started a poetry workshop at the Borders in Manchester, CT. I also published my first book, memory plays, a collection of pastoral odes to common things.  Ten years ago, I moved to Boston & started reading at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, MA. There, I found the power of emotion both in performance & writing. I graduated with a Master's Degree in Library Science from Simmons College & published a second book titled homefront, that featured a poem for every half hour of the day. I was contributing to a blog with the goal of writing 365 poems in 365 days. Many of those poems went into my recent collection, Twentieth Century Limited, which features a poem for every year of the twentieth century. I'll be reading from that book. 

Sam Cha grew up in Korea.  He went to school at Seoul National University, Williams College, UVA, and Rutgers.  He's a second year MFA poet at UMass.  You can find his work (poems, translations, and essays) online and in print in various places, if you're really good at Googling.

Write on the DOT Presents the Cork Literary Review

Tuesday, November 15th, 7 pm. At the Blarney Stone, 1505 Dorchester Avenue--next to the Field's Corner T station. Map.

Anna Ross was raised in the U.S. by a Dublin girl and goes back over to Ireland frequently to spend time with her family there, including, in proper Irish fashion, several first cousins who are the same age as her daughter. Her chapbook, Hawk Weather, won the 2008 New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press and the 2009 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Paris Review, The New Republic, Southwest Review, AGNI Online, Salamander, and Barrow Street, has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded a 2010 poetry grant by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches at Stonehill College, where she is Poet in Resident, and is contributing poetry editor for Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics.

Eugene O’Connell is the editor of the Cork Literary Review. He has published three collections of poems, including One Clear Call (Bradshaw) and Diviner (Three Spires Press). His book of translations, Flying Blind (from the Latvian, by Guntar Godins), was published by Southward Editions, as part of the Cork European City of Culture translation series in 2005.

Joseph Woods is a poet and Director of Poetry Ireland since 2001. His collections Sailing to Hokkaido (2001) and Bearings (2005) were both published by the Worple Press, UK. For his first book, he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Dedalus Press gathered his first two collections in one volume entitled Cargo (2010) and in May 2011 they published his third collection, Ocean Letters.

Jamie O’Connell is the 2012 Writer in Residence for Tigh Fili Arts Centre, Cork City. As part of his residency, his first short story collection, Some Sort of Beauty, will be published in spring 2012. In 2011, he was selected to read at The Lonely Voice reading series in the Irish Writer’s Centre. He edited One, a play by Michael Scott, wich won the Best New Writing Award and Best Intercultural Dialogue Award at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. His short stories have been published in a number of journals including A Curious Impulse and The Bell. Jamie was shortlisted for the Wicklow Writer’s Short Story Award in 2008, and won the Thomas Harding Litereary Award (2008). He has written for the Evening Echo, The Cork Independent, and The Herald. He has an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin.

Molly McGuire is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she is currently working on her poetry thesis. She has marched in the Quad Cities St. Patrick's Day Parade--the only bi-state St. Patrick's Day parade in the country--every year for much of her life.

Video: September 5th WotD reading at Pearl Street Studios

Write on the Dot's December reading is coming soon, with another exciting slate of readers. While you await that imminent announcement, click through to enjoy these videos of all the wonderful readers at our September 5th reading!

September 5th, Pearl Street Studios

DATE/TIME/VENUE


Monday, September 5th, 2011. 7-8:30PM
Savin Hill Yoga @ Pearl Street Studios; 
11 Pearl Street, Dorchester 
MA 02125


VENUE DIRECTIONS

Take an ASHMONT-bound RED LINE train to Savin Hill station. Exit onto Savin Hill Avenue and walk downhill (away from the bridge) toward Dorchester Avenue. Turn Right on Dorchester Avenue and walk another 3.5 blocks to Pearl Street. Turn Left on Pearl Street. The venue is at the end of a cobblestone driveway.

OR

Take any RED LINE to JFK/UMass station. Exit toward Sydney Street or Columbia Road and walk 3-4 blocks west to Dorchester Avenue. Turn Left on Dorchester Avenue and walk south 5-10mins to Pearl Street. Turn Right on Pearl Street. The venue is just around the corner at the end of a cobblestone driveway.

http://www.savinhillyoga.com/directions.html

READERS


Danielle Fontaine is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her work has received an honorable mention in the Academy of American Poets Writing Competition and has been featured on NPR’s “Here and Now” website. Her poems have appeared in Juked Poetry, Front Range, Breakwater Review and others. She writes both conventional and performance poetry and has featured at various venues in the Boston area.

Sandra Kohler’s third book of poems, Improbable Music, was 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.

Calvin Hennick is a third-year fiction student in the MFA program at UMass Boston. He used to make money writing about water main breaks and school building projects for the Boston Globe. Now he’s taking time off to teach creative writing, raise his son, and write things that make him absolutely no money whatsoever. He’s working on his first novel.  

Natty Forsythe once read that we all now exist in an idiom of eternal present. But he read that in the past, which doesn't matter anymore. Right now he is an MFA student at UMass Boston and an editor for ripple(s). Oh wait, now he's working on a novel about indie rock, ghosts, and efficient public transportation. Oh wait, now he's wandering the New England countryside in search of Viking artifacts. Oh wait, now he's eating a muffin.

Mitch Manning studied English and Classics at Suffolk University in Boston and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a co-founder of Suffolk University’s Classics program. His work has appeared in the Charles River Journal and The Open End. He will attend the MFA program in poetry at UMass Boston this fall.

U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo is a multi-talented Zimbabwean Performance Artist and proud UMASS Boston Alum. She has been gracing numerous stages in Boston and abroad performing her original poetry, songs, and music since 1996, from Off Broadway Theatre ( Sage Theatre in New York) to The Book Café in Zimbabwe, Wally’s Jazz Café to The Horror Café in South Africa, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to Boston Opera House, and Roxbury Community College to the Museum of African American Art. She is also a singer/musician, actress, and amateur photographer, and her work has been part of a group exhibit at Boston City Hall.  U-Meleni has written and produced a CD of poetry & music entitled “Soul Psalms, Birth, Death, and Resurrexion which has been used as a teaching tool in schools, universities, NGO’s and in films and documentaries.
www.cdbaby.com/umeleni. She is currently working on her second book of poetry to be published end of 2011.For more info: www.u-meleni.com

Video recap: May 3rd

Check out the video of our inaugural readings below the cut!

May 3rd Reading, 7pm at The Blarney Stone

Rad Thie is from Cincinnati. He is studying poetry at UMass Boston.

Andra Hibbert is a queer writer pursuing an MFA in fiction at UMass Boston. She grew up in northern Vermont and attended Williams College. She has worked as an editor for Breakwater Review and Concrete. If Marilynne Robinson, Neko Case, and Michael Ondaatje could have a storytelling baby, she would like to be that baby. Her short story, Centers of Gravity, is forthcoming from Five Points.

Kurt Klopmeier is from St. Louis and is currently a first-year masters student in poetry at UMass. In his freshman year of high school he wrote a poem "When I See You," which rhymed "wrong or right," "day or night," and "ever might" in successive lines. He hopes that he has grown as a poet since then. He lives in Savin Hill and especially likes walking up to the peak of what he assumes is the eponymous hill in the park there. The last line of a poem that has affected him the most is from Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo": "You must change your life."

Zachary Bos
Q: What are three qualities you value in good poetry/fiction?

ZB: It needs to be memorable, both the plot and the phrasing; it needs to be accurate (even if it is all lies); and it needs to matter. There are many books which I read because they are diverting or entertaining, but I wouldn't call them "good," any more than I'd call a McDonald's chicken sandwich "good." It may hit the spot, but it isn't good. A work of literature that matters is good enough "to engrave on a ring or a stone," to quote a poem by Alissa Valles from
Boston Review a few years back.

Q: What was the title of an early work of yours (think childhood) and what was it about (preferably embarrassing)?

ZB: "Paterson" was something I was writing in middle school and grade school, when 1) I lived in Paterson, New Jersey; 2) I'd heard about Williams' long poem and said to myself in a fit of presumption, I can do that; and 3) I wanted to chronicle the acute difficulty of my awful, terrible, no-good existence. The self-regard was the terrible part, really.

Betsy Gomez is from El Centro, California. She is studying poetry at UMass Boston. She is currently a managing editor at Breakwater Review. Her interests include Russian literature, theology, and music.














Mark Rotondi


Q: What's your favorite 1st or last line to a poem?
 MR: "I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab which is typical and not just of modern life" Song, Frank O'Hara.

Q: Suggest a writer more people should know and read (and give a reason why).
MR: Italo Calvino. His books are never finished saying what they have to say.

Q: What are three qualities you value in good poetry/fiction?
MR: Something that signifies nothing, something written by a keen observer, something that is unintentionally funny.

Q: What was the title of an early work of yours (think childhood) and what was it about (preferably embarrassing)?
MR: "Play cards with me papa." It was about how much I hated solitaire.