Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under 35, held once each January, March, May, July, September, and November. The series seeks to promote and bolster young Massachusetts poets while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets. If you are a poet under the age of 35, sign up to read via Mass Poetry's website! This event is free and open to the public. 

http://www.masspoetry.org/u35

Our January readers are:

Raina K. Puels is a queer, polyamorous human living in Allston. She graduated from Emerson with her MFA in May of 2019. Her collection of essays, Resaturation was long-listed for PANK's book prize. By day, she works as an admin at MIT and by night, she hangs out with her little black cat, Layla Stoner Sparkle Demon. You can read her writing in The Rumpus, GAY Mag, American Literary Review, Yes Poetry, and many other places listed on her website: rainakpuels.com. 

Ananya Panchal is a 20-year-old Boston University student studying Journalism and Criminal Justice. For as long as she can remember, Ananya has loved writing. Journalism is her way of analyzing and entering the dialogue of the world around her, but poetry has always been her way of analyzing herself and her many emotions. Ananya has self-published a book of poetry, performed at open mics and given a Ted Talk in her hometown of Los Altos, California. This is her first Boston performance.

Casey Lynn Roland is a second year graduate student at the University of New Hampshire, pursuing an MFA in Poetry. She lives, works, writes, and makes art on the North Shore of Massachusetts, but spends much of her time on Lake Winnipesaukee; her poetry attempts to reconcile her relationships to those places, the people in them, and how they are always changing. Casey’s current obsessions are folklore, trees, and the idea that all time is simultaneous. She also creates blackout poetry, and you can see some of her work on Instagram at @mscaseycreates and at www.caseylynnroland.com.

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under 35, held once each January, March, May, July, September, and November. The series seeks to promote and bolster young Massachusetts poets while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets. If you are a poet under the age of 35, sign up to read via Mass Poetry's website! This event is free and open to the public. 

http://www.masspoetry.org/u35

Our March readers are:

Emily Duggan is interested in work — and play! — at the intersection of the performing/expressive arts and individual and community healing. To that end, they create and perform poetry, experimental theater, and improv, sketch, and stand-up comedy. In the recent past, they have: acted and written with various performance troupes in Roslindale; appeared as a featured poet for the Boston Poetry Slam; enjoyed a stint as an ensemble member at Chicago's Green Mill; and haunted graveyards as a ghost-tour guide. Lately, they partner with Writers Without Margins, bringing writing beyond conventional spaces, and they served as Mass Poetry's Development Intern last spring.

Egan Millard has worked as a journalist in Alaska, Maine and New York City, where he grew up. His poetry has appeared in The Worcester Review, Cirque, The Aurorean (featured poet, Spring/Summer 2019), and “Building Fires in the Snow” (University of Alaska Press, 2016), the first-ever anthology of LGBTQ Alaskan writers, and is forthcoming in "From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod and the Islands Through Poetry" (Bass River Press, 2020). His chapbook "Interstate" is available from Harvard Book Store. He now lives in Boston, where he works as a reporter and editor.

Sarah O'Brien loves dark chocolate and light wordplay. Sarah is the author of the poetry book Shapeshifter and she is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Boston Accent Lit, a literary journal and press. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Sarah has been published in places such as Allegro Poetry Magazine, Elbow Room, Helen Literary Magazine, Homology Lit, and The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets. She was runner-up for the 2018 Helen W. Kenefick Academy of American Poets prize with her poem "School of Love." Sarah is active in the writing community; she often reads work at The Bebop or Cantab Lounge and she volunteers at Grub Street's Muse & the Marketplace and Mass Poetry's annual Poetry Festival. Learn more at www.sarahobrien.org

Georgia Park is a contributing editor of Sudden Denouement, founder of Whisper and the Roar, and author of Quit Your Job and Become a Poet (Out of Spite). She dropped out of high school in 2004 and earned her Master’s degree with an emphasis on creative writing in 2019. She is currently teaching English and ESL at the college level. She has been published in several literary magazines, most recently, The Offbeat and Soundings East. Her work has also been featured in several books, including We Will Not Be Silenced, All the Lonely People, Smitten, and Anthology Volume l: Writings from the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective. Georgia has been asked to speak about her poetry at several educational institutions, including Boston University. Georgia's current book, titled Softly Glowing Exit Signs, is an autobiography written in poetry that covers her time in Korea and her journey from dysfunctional childhood to semi-functional adulthood.

IN ONE VERSION OF THE STORY is a lyric exploration of the ways human beings confront desire, loss and absence by creating stories. It begins with from the French folk legend of “l’Inconnue de la Seine”—the unidentified young woman who drowned herself in Paris in the 1880s, and whose (unauthorized) death mask was eventually cast as the face of Resusci-Anne CPR training dummies—but eventually the book encompasses a chronicle of personal loss, a history of photography, a study of the mechanics of breathing, and a solo climb to the rim of a Mediterranean volcano. Ultimately, it is story-making itself which is interrogated, however the book seeks not to recreate narratives, but rather to understand why they matter—why and how we give them the meaning that we do.