Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

George Abraham’s highly anticipated debut Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) constructs a dialogue in which “every pronoun is a Free Palestine.” Through poems of immense emotion, and the use of alluring form, Abraham crafts work that examines what we come to own by existing. As trauma seeps through generations, can the body deconstruct its own inheritance? In a world that only takes, what is owed?

George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and writer from Jacksonville, FL. Their debut Birthright won the Big Other Book Award and the Arab American Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. He is a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and The Boston Foundation, and winner of the 2017 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational's Best Poet title. Their work has appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, Abraham currently teaches at Emerson College and is a Litowitz MFA+MA Candidate at Northwestern University.

This virtual poetry workshop is a vehicle for critique, a time of close reading and thoughtful responses that help craft the written word so that it says exactly what the author intends. The focus is the work itself. Poets are respectful of each other, value the craft, understand the courage it takes to have work critiqued, and make the final decisions about their own writing. Please join us. Writing prompts will be shared with registrants one week before the workshop, and we request you submit your work at least three days before the workshop to give attendees time to read your poem.

Susan Roney-O’Brien earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College and is the author of five poetry collections. She hosts monthly poetry readings, teaches workshops and coordinates the Stanley Kunitz summer writing series.

This virtual poetry workshop is a vehicle for critique, a time of close reading and thoughtful responses that help craft the written word so that it says exactly what the author intends. The focus is the work itself. Poets are respectful of each other, value the craft, understand the courage it takes to have work critiqued, and make the final decisions about their own writing. Please join us. Writing prompts will be shared with registrants one week before the workshop, and we request you submit your work at least three days before the workshop to give attendees time to read your poem.

Susan Roney-O’Brien earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College and is the author of five poetry collections. She hosts monthly poetry readings, teaches workshops and coordinates the Stanley Kunitz summer writing series.

Joe Fusco Jr. is a well-seasoned poet and humorist from Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of four books of semi-amusing poems and essays: Pondering the Pandemic During the Rust Years (2021); Hmm…That’s Different (2020); Three Score (2014); and The Lost and Found Essays (2012), all available on Amazon. Joe’s musings have appeared in Damfino Press, Ballard Street Poetry, Worcester Review, Asinine Poetry, and the naughty ezine Clean Sheets. He was a co-winner of the Jacob Knight Poetry Award in 2002 and was named Best Poet by Worcester Magazine readers in 1999 and 2002. Joe is still a frequent contributor to Worcester Magazine and the last Worcester Mega-Slam winner in 2017. Joe has lived in lovely Worcester with his better half Cyndi and their large family for thirty-five years. He is a registered Independent and sleeps with one eye always open. More info on Joe can be found at joesyellowpad.com.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers presents a reading by CAConrad and Dawn Lundy Martin on Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 8:00 p.m. in the Old Chapel. The reading will be followed by a book signing and refreshments. 

CAConrad is a 2019 Creative Capital Fellow and the author of 9 books of poetry and essays: their While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017) received the 2018 Lambda Award. A recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, they also received the Believer Magazine Book Award and the Gil Ott Book Award. Their work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Polish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Danish, French, and German. They teach regularly at Columbia University and at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Influenced by Eileen Myles, Audre Lorde, Alice Notley, and Emily Dickinson, Conrad writes poems in which stark images of sex, violence, and defiance build a bridge between fable and confession. They are a visiting faculty member for Spring 2020 at UMass Amherst.
 
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life; which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE; A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering; and three limited edition chapbooks. Most recently, she co-edited with Erica Hunt an anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING. Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper’s, n+1, and elsewhere. Martin is a Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is the recipient of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
 
Celebrating its fifty-sixth year, the nationally renowned Visiting Writers Series at UMass Amherst presents emerging and established writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The Series is sponsored by the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative, and made possible by support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council, the English Department, and others. 

All events are free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible. Find us on Facebook here.

Slate Roof Press announces its Annual Poetry Chapbook Contest. The winner receives publication, $500, and will become an active member of the press. Slate Roof’s award-winning bookmaker produces beautiful books with letterpress covers and high-quality papers. DEADLINE JULY 31, 2020.

Based in Greenfield, MA, Slate Roof is a member-run, not-for-profit collaborative, which has published the best new voices in poetry in art-quality chapbooks since 2004.

The border is closed to people but open to poetry! Open mic for poets from anywhere in the world, with an emphasis on building community between US and Canadian poets. Free/by donation.

Moira Linehan will read from & Company, her fourth collection of poetry. In this collection she uses paintings from French and American Impressionists to imagine the work and world of her maternal grandmother, a seamstress and dressmaker in Paris in the late 1800/early 1900’s and then in Boston. She will discuss strategies for using paintings as triggers for poems, and give examples of the relationship between a poem’s subject matter and its form.

Moira Linehan is the author of four collections of poetry. Her first two, If No Moon (2007) and Incarnate Grace (2015), were published by Southern Illinois University Press. Dorianne Laux chose If No Moon as the 2006 winner of the Crab Orchard Series open poetry competition. Both books were named Honor Books in Poetry in the Massachusetts Book Awards. In 2020 she had two books come out. In June Slant Books published her collection Toward and in December Dos Madres Press brought out & Company. Linehan lives north of Boston.