Nov. 3 Poet Kim Triedman

Kim Triedman began writing poetry after working in fiction for several years. In the past year, she's been named winner of the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition, finalist for the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award, finalist for the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition and, most recently, semifinalist for the 2008 Parthenon Prize for Fiction. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies here and abroad, including Main Street Rag, Poetry International, Appalachia, The Aurorean, Avocet, The New Writer, Byline Magazine, Poet's Ink, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Journal (U.K.), Asinine Poetry, Poetry Monthly, Current Accounts, Ghoti Magazine, IF Poetry Journal, Great Kills Review, Trespass Magazine, Mature Years, ART TIMES, Literary Bird Journal, and FRiGG Magazine.

Additionally, one of her recent poems was selected by John Ashbery to be included in the Ashbery Resource Center’s online catalogue, which serves as a comprehensive bibliography of both Ashbery's work and work by artists directly influenced by Ashbery. This poem has also been included in the John Cage Trust archives at Bard College. Ms. Triedman has been nominated for the anthologies Best New Poets 2009 and Best of the Web 2010. She is a graduate of Brown University and lives in the Boston area with her husband and three daughters. Her first poetry collection -- "bathe in it or sleep" -- was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in October of 2008.

Poet Len Solo Oct 27, 2009

LEN SOLO has been an educator for most of his professional work life: a public high school teacher of English, Math and Social Studies; founder of a small, private alternative school in Atlantic City; founder and department chairperson of the Teacher Development Program, Stockton State College, Pomona, NJ; principal for 27 years of the famous Graham & Parks Alternative Public School, Cambridge + Interim Principal, Cambridge Rindge and Latin High Schools for 1.5 years. For the past seven years he has been an education consultant.
I've had 3 volumes of poetry published: Landscape of the Misty Eye, with Steve Weitzman (2004); Rooted in Place (2006) and The Magic of Light (2008). All are available on Amazon.com.
INFLUENCES: e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and, oddly Ernest Hemingway.

MY GUEST: OCT 20, 2009 Lise Haines author of "Girl in the Arena"

LISE HAINES is the author of three novels, Girl in the Arena, published in the US and the UK (Bloomsbury) and in Turkey (Alfa-Artemis Yayınevi); Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006” by the NPR station in San Diego ; and In My Sister’s Country, (Penguin/Putnam), a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals and she was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award.

Haines is Writer in Residence at Emerson College. She has been Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and her other teaching credits include UCLA, UCSB, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She grew up in Chicago, lived in Southern California for many years, and now resides in the Boston area. She holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Oct 13 Poet Valerie Lawson

Valerie Lawson is the co-editor of Off the Coast magazine, and has published work in literary journals, anthologies, and websites. Twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Lawson wom awards for Best Narrative Poem, Female Spoken Word, and shared the award for Best Poetry Troupe with Doc Brown's Traveling Poetry Show at the Cambridge Poetry Awards. Lawson was the slammaster of the Bridgewater Poetry Slam at the Daily Grind Coffeehouse and a co-host of the Boston Poetry Slam. Lawson’s involvement in Boston area youth slams included the New England Scores slam and coaching an all-girl team that went to the YouthSpeaks National Slam. Lawson has traveled to Europe and the UK to perform poetry and helped host the Swedish Slam Nationals in 2002. Lawson was a participant in Optimal Avenues, a mixed-media cultural exchange between Massachusetts and Ireland, celebrating the United Nation's International Decade for the Culture of Peace. Dog Watch, a book of poems was released in 2007.

OCT 6, 2009: Poet Barbara Trachtenberg

Barbara Trachtenberg writes:



30 years as teacher and school psychologist have fed my writing. Lately I teach—prisoners (PEN’s Prison Writing Program), immigrants and literacy teachers, elders and students at Boston U and Harvard. I play with visual art, chamber music and travel and am fluent in Spanish learned from students and combi drivers. My best writing experience was at MacDowell Colony. My writing has appeared at Boston City Hall, in Words and Images, Multicultural Review, ArtsEditor, Latin American Anthropology Review, and The NewEnglander (a Yankee publication). My earliest writing—a 19-year-old hitchhiker’s travel memoir, set in early 60s Western Europe and Hungary—was pushed by my wanting to meet Hungarian relatives. I am a member of PEN New England and past member of Boston’s Writers’ Room. My memoir-in-progress of my mother's life in 1938, connects to my first trip to Hungary. My doctorate in literacy, language and cultural studies and masters in counseling psychology, and in English and special education influence my writing too. My favorite nonfiction characters are Ari and Dov and Noa, my sons and granddaughter.

Sept 22 Fiction writer Susan Tepper author of "Deer"

Sept 8 Poet, Journalist Djelloul Marbrook 5PM

Djelloul Marbrook
Literary, cultural and political dialogue


Djelloul Marbrook’s book of poems, Far From Algiers, is the 2007 winner of Kent State University’s Stan and Tom Wick First Book Prize in poetry. It was selected by Prof. Toi Derricotte of the University of Pittsburgh and was released in August 2008, His short story, Artists Hill, won the Literal Latté K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award in the spring of 2008.

His poetry appeared in Solstice (UK) and Beyond Baroque (California) in 1969. While continuing a lifelong study of poetry, he stopped writing poems until Sept. 11, 2001, when he began walking in Manhattan and writing in an effort to come to terms with the nihilism of the terrorist attacks. Recent poems have been published by The American Poetry Review, Oberon and The Ledge (New York), Perpetuum Mobile and Attic (Maryland), The Country and Abroad (New York) and Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (Algeria), in which the title poem of his book, Far From Algiers, was first published, and Istanbul Literary Review.

His novella, Alice Miller’s Room, is available at OnlineOriginals.com (UK). A small number of copies of his novella, Saraceno, were printed in 2006 by a Canadian publisher that failed before the book was distributed. A lively trade in used copies of Saraceno continues on the Internet. His fiction has also been published by Prima Materia (New York), Breakfast All Day (UK), and Potomac Review (DC).

He has had a distinguished career as a newspaper reporter and editor. He began studying journalism while in the Navy. When he was discharged he went to work for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island and began writing under the byline Del Marbrook.

He managed a regional bureau for The Journal before moving on to become the metropolitan editor of The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, the paper where the Gannett newspaper organization was born. Marbrook ran the Star-Gazette newsroom and began to acquire the production and design experience that would later propel his career.

He moved to The Baltimore Sun as a copy editor, specializing both in makeup and production and Middle Eastern correspondence, an unusual combination that grew from his Arab history studies at Columbia. He was soon offered a job as the Sunday editor of The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal & Sentinel, where he was in charge of features, book reviews and Sunday production.

At The Washington (DC) Star, an evening newspaper, during the Watergate period when The Star and The Washington Post contended for dominance, Marbrook was the Saturday front page editor, specialized in foreign news and edited such syndicated columnists as Mary McGrory.

He was a co-founder of Education Funding News, a biweekly Washington report on federal education news.

In the 1980s Marbrook worked for MediaNews, helping to revitalize six ailing daily newspapers in Ohio and New Jersey.

He has won a number of awards for writing, newspaper design and photography. His career has spanned all the major transitions in modern journalism—from typewriters and teletypes to computers, from hot lead typography to photo-offset and then to the Internet. He writes frequently about Internet journalism (www.djelloulmarbrook.com) and produces a daily blog about literary and cultural affairs. He mentors journalism students around the world for the Student Operated Press.

He retired in 1987 to write poetry and fiction and now lives in the mid-Hudson Valley and Manhattan with his wife, Marilyn