New England College MFA Program in Poetry Reading Series

All readings are free and open to the public. Readings held in the Simon Center's Great Room located at 98 Bridge Street, Henniker, NH at 7:30 PM. Call 603-428-2000 to confirm.


Friday, January 4, 2008 Paula McLain, Gerald Stern, Ross Gay

Saturday, January 5, 2008 Maxine Kumin, Joan Larkin

Sunday, January 6, 2008 Kurt Brown (guest), Carol Frost, Malena Morling

Tuesday, January 8, 2008 Peter Campion, (guest), Alicia Ostriker, Anne Marie Macari

Thursday, January10, 2008 James Harms (guest) $ Jeff Friedman

Friday, January 11, 2008 Ilya Kaminisky & Michael Waters

All readings are held in the Great Room in the Simon Center at 7:30 PM, 98 Bridge Street, Henniker, NH. Readings are free and open to the public.


Reader Biographies

Kurt Brown founded the Aspen Writers' Conference, and Writers' Conferences & Centers (a national association of directors). His poems have appeared in many literary periodicals, and he is the editor of several anthologies including Blues for Bill, for the late William Matthews, from University of Akron Press and his newest (with Harold Schechter), Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems from Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series. He is the author of six chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Return of the Prodigals, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fables from the Ark, Future Ship, and a new collection, No Other Paradise, due out in 2008 from Red Hen Press. A collection of the poems of Flemish poet Herman de Coninck entitled The Plural of Happiness, which he and his wife translated, was released in the Field Translation Series in 2006. He teaches poetry workshops and craft classes at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and was recently the McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia.

Peter Campion has published a book of poems, Other People (University of Chicago Press) and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson (Terrence Rogers Fine Art.) His second collection of poems, The Lions (University of Chicago Press) will be published in 2008. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Agenda, ArtNews, The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Sculpture, Slate, Tikkun and elsewhere. He has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford. He teaches at Washington College in Maryland. He's the editor of the journal, Literary Imagination.


Jeff Friedman is the author of four collections of poetry: Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986). His poems and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, 5 AM, New England Review and The New Republic.

Carol Frost’s poems have appeared in four Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she was the poetry editor for Pushcart XXVIII. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two fellowships, and her writing has been honored by PEN, the Elliston and the Poets’ Prize committees, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her books include Love and Scorn, New and Selected Poems, Venus and Don Juan, Pure, I Will Say Beauty, and The Queen’s Desertion, all published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Her essays and poems appear in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and the New York Times. She founded and directs the Catskill Poetry Workshop at Hartwick College, where she is Professor of English and writer-in-residence. She has also taught at Syracuse University, for the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Wichita State University (as Distinguished Poet, in the spring of 1998), Washington University, where she was visiting writer fall, 1998, the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Five Islands Press Workshop at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and numerous other workshops and universities. She divides her time between Cedar Key, Florida, and upstate New York.

Ross Gay’s book, Against Which, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry among many others. He is a Cave Canem fellow, and a former Bread Loaf scholar. He has been nominated for the Pushcart three times, and has been recognized by the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the New Millenium Poetry Prize, and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize, among others. In addition to being a contributing editor at Q Avenue Chapbook Press, his collaborative paintings and artists’ books have been shown in galleries in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Ross teaches at Montclair State University.

James Harms is the author of five books from Carnegie Mellon University Press, After West (2008), Freeways and Aqueducts (2004), Quarters (2001), The Joy Addict (1998) and Modern Ocean (1992). His poems, stories and essays have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Verse, The Antioch Review, West Branch and many other journals. For his poetry he has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and grants from the Pennsylvania and West Virginia Arts Commissions. He lives with his family in Morgantown, West Virginia, where he is the founding director of the MFA Program at West Virginia University. For the spring semester of 2008 he will be Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine.

In addition, Ilya writes poetry in Russian. His work in that language was chosen for "Bunker Poetico" at Venice Bienial Festival in Italy. In late 1990s, he co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization which sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad with a goal of supporting such relief organizations as Doctors Without Borders and Survivors International.

Ilya has served as a Writer In Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and has taught poetry at numerous literary centers. In Fall 2006, he began teaching in the graduate writing program at San Diego State University. Ilya has also worked as a Law Clerk at the National Immigration Law Center, and more recently at Bay Area Legal Aid, helping impovershed and homeless in solving their legal difficulties. He currently lives in Berkeley, Califonia with his beautiful wife, Katie Farris.

Joan Larkin’s most recent collection is My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose, 2007). She is the translator, with Jaime Manrique, of Sor Juana’s Love Poems; co-editor of the Living Out series at the University of Wisconsin Press, and recent poetry editor of Bloom. She co-founded Out & Out Books as part of the feminist literary explosion of the 1970’s and co-edited Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry (with Ellly Bulkin) and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (with Carl Morse). Her anthology of coming out stories, A Woman Like That, was nominated for Publishing Triangle and Lambda awards for nonfiction in 2000. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has served on the faculties of Brooklyn, Sarah Lawrence, and Goddard Colleges and as Distinguished Visiting Poet at Columbia College Chicago.

Anne Marie Macari’s second book, Gloryland, was published in 2005 by Alice James Books. Her first book, Ivory Cradle, won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly. In 2005 she won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine. Macari is a member of the core faculty at the New England College low residency MFA program in poetry.

Malena Morling was born in Stockholm in 1965 and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of two books of poetry Ocean Avenue selected by Philip Levine for the New Issues Press Poetry Prize in 1998 and Astoria published by Pittsburgh Press in 2006. She has translated poems by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, a selection of which appeared in the collection For the Living and the Dead. Her poems have also appeared in numerous publications and anthologies including The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Washington Post Book World, Double Take/Points of Entry and Five Points. Currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, she has taught at New York University, the University of Montana, Syracuse University and the New School. In 1999 she was awarded The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award and in 2004 the Lotos Club Foundation Prize.In 2007 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, has published eleven volumes of poetry, including The Volcano Sequence and No Heaven. Her most recent prose book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, and many other journals and anthologies. Twice a National Book Award finalist, she has also received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Poetry Center, and the Paterson Poetry Center, among others. Ostriker lives in Princeton, and is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University.

Michael Waters’ books of poetry include Darling Vulgarity (2006); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001); Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997)—these titles from BOA Editions—Bountiful (1992); The Burden Lifters (1989); and Anniversary of the Air (1985)—these titles from Carnegie Mellon UP. He has co-edited Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). The recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes, he has published poems in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Rolling Stone, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, The North American Review, and Ploughshares.

Maxine Kumin's new poetry collection, Still to Mow, will be published in September 2007 by WW Norton. Author also of Jack and Other New Poems, The Long Marriage and a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a.Recovery, Kumin's awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. She and her husband live on a farm in New Hampshire.

Gerald Stern is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has written thirteen books of poetry, including American Sonnets. This Time, New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award of Poetry in 1998. Other collections include Last Blue, Odd Mercy, and Bread Without Sugar. His most recent books are Everything is Burning and What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes on My Life. Stern has received the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three NEA grants, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Ruth Lilly Prize. Until his retirement in 1995, he taught at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has also served on the faculty of Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Pittsburgh. Gerald Stern attends each residency in the New England College MFA Program in Poetry. In 2005, he won the prestigious Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.