Events

We are pleased to
host a series of readings by poets from the Workshop for Published
Poets. Reading on January 4 are the following poets:

Emily Ferrara is the
author of The Alchemy of
Grief, a collection of
poems selected to win the Bordighera Poetry Prize, and published in bilingual
edition (English and Italian) in
2007. She is featured, along with the book’s translator Sabine Pascarelli, in
the winter 2008 season of NPR’s “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of
Congress.” She has published and presented
nationally on the power of writing to foster personal and professional
development, and on creative writing as a form of reflective practice. Ferrara’s work engages
subjects intrinsic to the human experience and the transcendent, including
themes of love, loss, personal and professional identity, the illness
experience, death and dying, and transformation. Ferrara has received recognition for her poetry
from the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, the Worcester County Poetry
Association, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems are
forthcoming in Superstition
Review and Auscultations, and have appeared in UU World,Lumina, Worcester Review, Ballard Street Poetry Journal , and others and
anthologized in several books, most recently in The Poet’s Cookbook: Recipes from Tuscany.

Eric Hyett’s first
collection of poetry, English Through
PicturesBack
Bay View, Salamander,
The Harvard Advocate, and The
Coin Flip Shuffle as well as Gwyneth.vg and various online collections.
Eric is a graduate of Harvard College, where he studied poetry with
Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido. A linguist, he is fluent in 6 languages,
and has translated poetry (as well as written his own) in English, French,
German, and Japanese. He has just completed his second book: a collection
entitled Flight
Risk. was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His work
has appeared in

Lee Firestone
Dunne from Northwestern University, earned a Masters degree in Speech
Pathology from Hunter College, and studied British theatre in
England and
Scotland on a Fulbright scholarship.
She has worked as a professional actor in New York City, and as a college professor. Each
year, she presents workshops on developing human potential (based on the work of
The Creative Problem-Solving Institute) in the U.S., Canada, and Italy. Her
poetry has appeared in Antigonish Review,
Comstock Review, Poetry Motel, and other literary publications. She
is the mother of four children and lives in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. About her new book, Cocktail Shaker, Dagan Coppock writes,
“She traverses multiple worlds — South
Africa and Chicago,
Japan and Newfoundland, American
suburbia and uninhabited nature — and yet her unique vision unifies this
collection.” Barbara Helfgott Hyett writes, “With a fearless and unsparing eye,
Dunne renders life into wisdom. The point-of-view takes the reader by surprise:
she is as disciplined as a clock.  Images arise from the accumulated
devastation: a family suffers its father — a myth, it seems, of alcoholism and
harsh love.  But the poet will not be shaken loose and carries her readers to
safety: an act not of rescue but of endurance.”

The Porter Square Books Book Club will be discussing Broccoli and Other Tales of Love and
Food. Visit the Book Club page for more information.

The Porter Square Books Book Club will be discussing Broccoli and Other Tales of Love and
Food. Visit the Book Club page for more information.

"An insider's
guide to the vanishing world of blueblood Boston...she limns the
pleasures and perils of adoring a parent who was as colorful and
elusive as a butterfly"

George Howe Colt, author of The Big House

"An
insightful, engaging memoir of...a brilliant biochemist and a member of
the 'Oppenheimer Fraternity,' a group of men and women who contributed
so much to the advancement of science in the 20th century."

Martin Sherwin, co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Growing up in a Boston blueblood family,
Anne Cabot Wyman had adventures that extended far beyond New England.
After losing her mother at age 13, Anne was raised from a distance by a
father who instilled in her a passion for the road less traveled. An
accomplished painter and a licensed pilot, she spent 30 years as a
writer at the Boston Globe, including 5 years as the paper's first
in-house travel writer and 10 years on the editorial page, much of it
during Boston's tumultuous battle over school busing.

"An altogether
remarkable book that could transform the way society feels about eating
animals. You cannot read it without learning something new and without
pondering your relation to the animal world. This is a profound and
deeply satisfying book that is destined to become a classic."

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep

"This eye-opening
book makes us question what we really mean when we say we love animals.
Anyone who has ever loved a dog or a cat or a hamster or a bird will
find abundant food for thought here."

John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America

Melanie Joy is a social psychologist and
professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She
holds a Ph.D in social psychology from Saybrook Graduate College and a
master's degree in teaching and curriculum from the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. She has written numerous articles on psychology,
animal rights, and social justice, and is th author of the activist
handbook Strategic Action for Animals.

Porter Square Books invites you to "A Taste of Sweet Bordeaux," a wine tasting with Chateau Coutet.

Former Porter Square resident Aline Baly shares with you her life on
the family vineyard, while providing an in-depth look at Bordeaux's
sweet wines and tasting Coutet's 2001, 2002, and 2005 vintages.

Space is limited so please call 617-491-2220 to reserve a spot.

Whether set in Maxim D. Shrayer’s native Russia or in North America and
Western Europe, the eight stories in this collection explore
emotionally intricate relationships that cross traditional boundaries
of ethnicity, religion, and culture. Tracing the lives, obsessions, and
aspirations of Jewish-Russian immigrants, these poignant, humorous, and
tender stories create an expansive portrait of individuals struggling
to come to terms with ghosts of their European pasts while
simultaneously seeking to build new lives in their American present.

Maxim D. Shrayer is professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Among his books are The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew and the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration. A bilingual author and translator, Shrayer won the National Jewish Book Award for the two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. 

The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which
came to an end along with the idealism of the 1960s. In Dark Days, Bright Nights,
acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the
test, showing the 60s—particularly the tumultuous period after the
passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—to be the catalyst of a movement
that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama. Joseph argues that
the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic
impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black
Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure. Joseph resurrects
the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements. Told
through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including
Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack
Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world.

Peniel E. Joseph is professor of history at Tufts University and the author of Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour.
He is the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation, and his work
has appeared in Souls, New Formations, and The Black Scholar. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Join Porter Square Books and the Boston Comics
Roundtable for an evening with contributors to Inbound #4, A Comic
History of Boston.

36 tales from Boston’s past, as written and drawn by local independent comics creators!

Since 2006, the Boston Comics Roundtable has been bringing comics artists and writers together to collaborate on Inbound, a twice-yearly anthology of “Comics from Boston.”

Now we’ve asked this diverse pool of comics talent
to choose their favorite characters and incidents from local history. 
The result is “A Comic Book History of Boston,” an entertaining tour
through three centuries of important social and political events,
bigger-than-life personalities, and colorful New England lore.

From Shay’s Rebellion and the great Molasses Flood,
to Charles Ponzi’s original “scheme” and Mark Twain’s disastrous
encounter with Boston literary society, to the 1970s busing crisis, 
the Gardner Museum heist and many more, the “Comic Book History of
Boston” is an opportunity for readers of all ages to take a fresh look
at our historical heritage and be introduced to the area’s thriving
independent comics scene.

"The eight short
stories of Daniyal Mueenuddin's enchanting debut are dreamlike,
illuminating contemporary Pakistan's societal contradictions in prose
as clear and serene as the contradictions themselves are subtle and
tumultuous."

Boston Globe

"Like Turgenev...Mueenuddin has an eye for the
tragedy and beauty in lives that a lesser writer might regard merely as
miserable or eccentric. In recent years, Pakistan has been regarded in
the West with anger and horror. Perhaps Mueenuddin's portrait will help
to bring it a different kind of attention, colored with sorrow and even
fondness."

New York Review of Books

Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in
Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College
and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker,
Granta, Zoetrope, The Best American Short Stories 2008, and The PEN/O.
Henry stories 2010. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was a finalist for
the National Book Award. Mueenuddin lives on a farm in Pakistan's
southern Punjab.

Join Porter Square Books for an evening with contributors to Illuminating Fiction: Today's Best Writers of Fiction, Author
Interviews by Sherry Ellis.

The interviews contained in
Illuminating Fiction include unique questions drawn from the text of
the authors' work, questions about narrative voice, character, place,
point of view, plot, revision, questions about the arc of the
story/novel, questions about writing process, questions about the
trajectory of the writer's career, and questions about the role and
importance of writing courses and mentoring. Interviewed authors also
provided their opinions of quotes about writing and creativity by other
authors and artists, and they respond to questions about the challenges
they face in developing their craft. The reader is thereby able to gain
an intimate and specific understanding of the writer's words and craft,
and what was going on in the author's mind as they created their
novels, short stories, and poems.

The readers for this event will be:

Steve
Almond is the author of two short story collections; My Life in Heavy
Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak, and the
novel Which Brings Me to You, co-authored by Julianna Baggot. His
short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope, McSweeney's,
Ploughshares and others, and his other work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Believer,
and Boston Magazine.

Sherry Ellis' interviews have
previously appeared in Kenyon Review, The Writer's Chronicle,
Glimmer Train, AGNI, and other publications. In 2006 Ellis' first
book on writing, NOW WRITE! Fiction Writing Exercises From Today's Best
Teachers and Writers, was selected as one of the best writing books of
the year by The Writer magazine. Her second book of writing
exercises NOW WRITE! Non-Fiction is forthcoming in 2009. Ellis has
recently completed writing The Goode Books, a novel, and she is at work
on NOW WRITE! Screenwriting. Ellis previously taught writing in
Concord, Massachusetts.

Lise Haines is the author of three
novels, Girl in the Arena, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity and In My Sister's Country,
and a chapbook of poetry, Thin Scars/Purple Leaves. Her short stories
have appeared in Ploughshares, Agni, and Post Road. Haines
has been a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Fiction Award.  Haines is
a Visiting Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University and was
Writer in Residence at Emerson College for four years.

Elizabeth
Searle's most recent work is the libretto for Tonya & Nancy: The
Opera, an original opera based on the infamous Harding/Kerrigan ice
skating scandal. She is also the author of Celebrities in Disgrace, a
finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, A Four Sided Bed wich was
nominated for an American Library Association Award, and the short
story collection My Body to You, which won the Iowa Short Fiction
Award. Her work has also been published in Michigan Quarterly, Agni,
Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of six books of prose and
poetry.  Her most recent book is The Moments
of Past Happiness.  Essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, The Harvard Review, the Virginia Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and in many
anthologies. Ms. Spivack is currently working on a personal literary memoir
about Robert Lowell and his circle: Sexton, Bishop, Plath etc. She teaches in
Boston and in Paris.

"(This book)
provides vital lessons for any teacher and for all those involved in
designing policies and programs to promote the success of early
childhood educators and their young pupils"

Libby Doggett, Deputy Director, Pew Center on the States

"...Sophia's
hunger for educational equity--borne out of the obstacles and triumphs
she experienced in the classroom--makes her an exciting leader and
change agent to watch..."

Daniel R. Porterfield, Ph.D., Senior Vice President for Strategic Development, Georgetown University

Sophia E. Pappas was a model teacher for
both novice and veteran pre-K educators in Newark, New Jersey and Teach
For America teachers in rural and urban regions across the country. She
also led Teach For America efforts to expand its presence in early
childhood education programs nationwide. Sophia is currently pursuing a
Master in Public Policy degree at Harvard University, where is a
participant in the program, "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office."

We are pleased to
host a series of readings by poets from the Workshop for Published
Poets. Reading on February 1 are the following poets:

JoAnne Preiser is a poet and a teacher. She received her MA from
the University of Massachusetts in 1990 and worked as an English teacher for
many years at Dover Sherborn High School. Recently retired, JoAnne is enjoying
the additional time she has to spend with her husband, Richard, to work on her
writing and to read the piles of books that have rooted next to her bed. She has
been published in numerous journals including Alehouse Press, Memoir
(and), Slipstream and most recently, New Millennium Writings.
Her work has received honors from Friends of Acadia Journal, The
Ledge, Inkwell and New Letters. Her chapbook, Confirmation,
was published by Finishing Line Press. JoAnne is currently working on a new
chapbook which consists of poems centered in the world of film and a full length
manuscript which she calls a family memoir in verse.

A few years ago, Connemara Wadsworth retired from 27 years of
teaching in nursery elementary schools to write and tutor. When she was a child,
her family lived in Baghdad, Iraq, for two years. She has studied and traveled
in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. Her work has been published in
magazines including Poet Lore, Comstock Review, Colere, Ibbetson Street
Press, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and the anthology Passionate
Hearts. She is completing a manuscript titled, The Possibility of
Scorpions, Poems from Baghdad, 1952-1954.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Muriel Craft
Bailey Award from The Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson
Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, and Split Oak Press. His work has been
featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, and The
Writer’s Almanac. Paul has two full-length collections of poetry, Bending
the Notes, and Dear Truth, both from Main Street Rag.
He works in Boston as an interpreter for the
deaf.