Dec 13 5PM Poet Teisha Twomey

Poet Teisha Twomey

Teisha Dawn Twomey is the poetry editor at Night Train, as well as an associate fiction editor for Wilderness House Literary Press. She received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous print and online poetry reviews and journals. By day, she is the Resource Specialist at Springfield College's Boston campus and by night, she is (currently) at work on her first novel. We will talking about her new collection of poetry " How to Treat Pretty Things."  To see it live go to http://scatvsomerville.org 

Dec 6, 2016 5PM Poet, Milton Scholar, Playwright, and Novelist Francis Blessington

Poet Francis  Blessington

Francis Blessington’s first novel is The Last Witch of Dogtown. He has translated The Bacchae of Euripides and The Frogs of Aristophanes. He has published two books of poems, Lantskip and Wolf Howl. He is a Milton specialist, the author of Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic and Paradise Lost: Ideal and Tragic Epic (A Student’s Companion to the Poem). His essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in the Harvard Magazine, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals. He has also published a play, Lorenzo de’ Medici. A professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston. He lives with his wife, Ann Taylor, also a writer and English professor, and their two children. In the summer, he works part-time on a farm in Spain.

Nov 8, 2016 Nanette Perrotte

Nanette Perrotte

Born to an Ecuadorian mother and French father, Perrotte was raised in Amsterdam Holland and Orlando Florida before attending Boston’s Berklee College of Music where she received her BA in Jazz Composition and Arranging with a principal instrument of Voice. This course of study was the fulfillment of a childhood spent singing and performing that continues on as a professional vocalist.

Perrotte’s Masters Degree in Education from Lesley University in Cambridge Massachusetts focused her work on Arts as a tool to learn about and experience cultural diversity. With her college teaching career, private voice students, college choir and acting/improv troupe, Perrotte has now evolved a new lecture/presentation form. This is a new series that combines social history, musicology and storytelling. Ella Fitzgerald- Queen of Swing and Duke Ellington and the Harlem Renaissance.

Recently Perrotte has been traveling with her internationally recognized father who is a chef and Continental Director of the Americas WACS. These travels to South America, South Korea and France have been part of witnessing Louis Perrotte’s work using fine cuisine as cultural diplomacy- although here it is an American chef encouraging chefs in other cultures to pursue their own cuisine first.

Nanette Perrotte’s travels have led to a series of blogs reflecting on cultural differences around music, cuisine and food preparation. Her blog posts (May, October 2012) on South Korea have quickly attracted a following of interested South Korean readers. In these travels Perrotte finds that people want to know the real America. With her musical background, Perrotte is able to convey that to them through the great American Songbook, the richness of our original music tradition that is loved and shared around the world.

Starting in 2010, Perrotte focused her musical theatre work by re-creating the story lines and music of traditional children’s literature to reflect current times and current generations of creative students. Some of her adaptations include: Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Perrotte has a 500 hour advanced Yoga certification, an AFAA Group Fitness Certification, TRX training certification and CPR certification.

Poet Joyce Peseroff Nov 1, 2016

see the show live at  http://scatvsomerville.org

Joyce Peseroff

Poet and editor Joyce Peseroff grew up in the Bronx. She earned a BA at Queens College and an MFA at the University of California at Irvine, where she studied with Donald Justice. She began a lifelong friendship with poet Jane Kenyon in 1973, when Peseroff entered the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows. In 1977, after both poets had returned to the Northeast, Peseroff and Kenyon cofounded the literary magazine Greenhouse.

Peseroff’s poems offer a sense of faceted perception, in which narrative supports rather than propels. In a 2014 interview with Katie Cantwell for the online literary magazine Niche, Peseroff discussed the thematic concerns of her forthcoming collection Know Thyself, stating, “I’m absorbed by the natural world and how we imagine it—more and more as the subject of elegy. The book was written after the deaths of my parents, so elegy is a sustained note in the chord.” Later in the same interview, she observed, “Whenever something new develops in poetry, many will argue, ‘That’s not poetry.’ Think of the reception of William Carlos Williams by the Poetry Society of America. Think of spoken word poets, poets who incorporate graphics, poets who write in code so robots can read them. It’s all poetry.”

Peseroff is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Hardness Scale (1977, reissued in 2000), Mortal Education (2000), Eastern Mountain Time (2006), and Know Thyself (forthcoming). She has served as an editor for Ploughshares and edited The Ploughshares Poetry Reader (1987), Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake (1984), and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon (2005).

Her honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation as well as a Pushcart Prize. Peseroff lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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Joelle Renstrom Oct 18, 2016

Joelle Renstrom

Joelle Renstrom is a writer living in Somerville, MA. Her collection of essays, Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature, was published by Pelekinesis in August, 2015. Joelle's blog Could This Happen? explores the relationship between science and science fiction, and won a 2012 Somerville Arts Council fellowship and a 2013 Writers' Room of Boston Nonfiction fellowship. She's the robot columnist for The Daily Beast and is a contributing writer for the new literary travel magazine Panorama. Her work has appeared in Slate, Guernica, the Guardian, The Toast, Slippage, Cognoscenti, and others. Joelle teaches writing and research with a focus on robots/AI, technology, space exploration, and science fiction at Boston University. Follow her on Twitter.

Oct 4, 2016 5PM Poet, Playwright, Novelist Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. His poetry has been published in Sewanee Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review and many other magazines. He has a chapbook called Strange News and two full-length books, Before Whose Glory and Age of Wonders. He has had three poems nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Kessenich has also published essays, had short plays produced at festivals in Boston, New York and Durango, Colorado, and his first novel, Cinnamon Girl,  was released inSeptember 2016.


To see the show live go to  http://scatvsomerville.org  

Poet Martha Collins: Sept 20, 2016 5PM

Poet Martha Collins

   ***** To see the show live go to:  http://scatvsomerville.org



Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Collins has also published four earlier collections of poems, three books of co-translations from the Vietnamese, and two chapbooks (see Books and Poems).

Sept 6, 2016 Poet Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is a political economist, poet, and publisher living in Greater Boston with his wife Kelly, their children Theo and Estelle, and Rexroth the family German Shepherd.  Gallagher's new poetry book, LOOM,  is published by MadHat Press.  Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston-based annual of poetry and poetics, and works as a Professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Pardee School for Global Studies. 

Poet Kevin Gallagher


see the show live at 5PM  at  http://scatvsomerville.org

 

Aug 23, 2016 Poet Tomas O'Leary

( Right to Left)) POET TOMAS O'LEARY with poets Doug Holder and Ifeanyi Menkiti at a reading at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square

Tomas O'Leary's third full-length collection of poetry, A Prayer for Everyone is just out from Ilora Press. Of the poems in this volume, X.J. Kennedy said, "I relished their verve, their cheerful strain of Irish blasphemy. And Rhymer's Horoscope is the best poem about poetry I've read in years." O'Leary's previous books are Fool at the Funeral and The Devil Take a Crooked House, both from Lynx House Press. O’Leary holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in expressive therapies and taught for years, and for years has worked with people who have Alzheimer's. He plays Irish accordion, sings on key, doodles artistically, and translates poetry from the Spanish.

Aug 9, 2016 5PM Poet Alfred Nicol

Alfred Nicol

see the show live at http://scatvsomerville.org

Alfred Nicol’s third full-length book of poetry, Animal Psalms, was published in March, 2016 by Able Muse Press. Designed and meticulously edited by Alex Pepple, the book has received glowing recommendations from several of our finest contemporary poets, including David Ferry, winner of the 2012 National Book Award, who wrote, “Dear reader, I’ve fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too.”

Nicol’s previous collection, Elegy for Everyone, published in 2009, was chosen for the first Anita Dorn Memorial Prize as “a work of complex vision and stylistic mastery.” He received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for an earlier volume, Winter Light, of which Jay Parini, biographer of Robert Frost, said, “This is certainly among the finest new volumes of poetry I have read in years.”
Alfred Nicol has written the lyrics for nine original compositions by classical/flamenco guitarist John Tavano. The CD, released in January, 2015, is titled The Subtle Thread.

In 2011 Nicol contributed a sequence of dream-notations to a book of images created by his sister, the artist Elise Nicol: the collaboration is titled Second Hand Second Mind. In 2009 Nicol, Tavano and poet Rhina Espaillat recorded the CD Melopoeia (poetry recited with musical accompaniment).
A member of the Powow River Poets since 1999, Nicol edited The Powow River Anthology, published in 2006.

Nicol’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, First Things, Atlanta Review, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, and other literary journals, as well as in Contemporary Poetry of New England and other anthologies.

July 12 5PM Poet Mark Pawlak-- author of new poetry collection Reconnaissance: New & Selected Poems & Poetic Journals 2005-2015

Mark Pawlak

  Doug Holder interviews poet Mark Pawlak about his new poetry collection " Reconnaissance"






                   
Mark Pawlak was born in Buffalo, New York in 1948. He moved to
  Boston in 1966 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where
  he studied physics, and he has continued to live in the Boston area. At
  the MIT, Pawlak enrolled in a poetry seminar with Denise Levertov.
  Poetry has been an integral part of his life and work ever since. His
  original poems, and his translations from the German of Bertolt Brecht
  and others, have appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies.
  Levertov introduced his first poetry collection, The Buffalo Sequence
  (Copper Canyon, 1978). Eight other collections have followed, the most
  recent, RECONNAISSANCE: New an Selected Poems and Poetic Journals (Hanging
  Loose). Pawlak is also the editor of a number of anthologies. PRESENT
  TENSE: Poets in the World (Hanging Loose, 2004), is a collection of
  contemporary political poetry. With Dick Lourie, he has edited four
  anthologies of outstanding high school writing, Shooting the Rat,
  Bullseye, Smart Like Me, and When We Were Countries (all from Hanging Loose)

 

July 5, 2016 5PM Doug Holder Interviews Kathleen Spivack about her new novel Unspeakable Things ( Knoph 2016)

Kathleen Spivack

To view the interview live go to  http://scatvsomerville.org

KATHLEEN SPIVACK is an award-winning writer. She studied with Robert Lowell and remained friends with him for eighteen years, and is the author of many books, among them Moments of Past Happiness, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle. She has had residencies at the Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Commission. She teaches in Boston and Paris.

Unspeakable Things

A novel

By Kathleen Spivack

About the Book:

A wild, erotic novel—a daring debut—from the much-admired, award-winning poet, author of Flying Inland, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others. A strange, haunting novel about survival and love in all its forms; about sexual awakenings and dark secrets; about European refugee intellectuals who have fled Hitler’s armies with their dreams intact and who have come to an elusive new (American) “can do, will do” world they cannot seem to find. A novel steeped in surreal storytelling and beautiful music that transports its half-broken souls—and us—to another realm of the senses. 

The setting: the early 1940s, New York—city of refuge, city of hope, with the specter of a red-hot Europe at war.

At the novel’s center:  Anna (known as the Rat), an exotic Hungarian countess with the face of an angel, beautiful eyes, and a seraphic smile, with a passionate intelligence, an exquisite ugliness, and the power to enchant . . . Her second cousin Herbert, a former minor Austrian civil servant who believes in Esperanto and the international rights of man, wheeling and dealing in New York, powerful in the social sphere yet under the thumb of his wife, Adeline . . . Michael, their missing homosexual son . . . Felix, a German pediatrician who dabbles in genetic engineering, practicing from his Upper East Side office with his little dachshund, Schatzie, by his side . . . The Tolstoi String Quartet, four men and their instruments, who for twenty years lived as one, playing the great concert halls of Europe, escaping to New York with their money sewn into the silk linings of their instrument cases . . .

And watching them all: Herbert’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Maria, who understands from the furtive fear of her mother, and the huddled penury of their lives, and the sense of being in hiding, even in New York, that life is a test of courage and silence, Maria witnessing the family’s strange comings and goings, being regaled at night, when most are asleep, with the intoxicating, thrilling stories of their secret pasts . . . of lives lived in Saint Petersburg . . . of husbands being sent to the front and large, dangerous debts owed to the Tsar of imperial Russia, of late-night visits by coach to the palace of the Romanovs to beg for mercy and avoid execution . . . and at the heart of the stories, told through the long nights with no dawn in sight, the strange, electrifying tale of a pact made in desperation with the private adviser to the Tsar and Tsarina—the mystic faith healer Grigory Rasputin (Russian for “debauched one”), a pact of “companionship” between Anna (the Rat) and the scheming Siberian peasant–turned–holy man, called the Devil by some, the self-proclaimed “only true Christ,” meeting night after night in Rasputin’s apartments, and the spellbinding, unspeakable things done there in the name of penance and pleasure . . .

June 28, 2016 Poet Lori Desrosiers 5PM

Lori Desrosiers

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Lori Desrosiers is the author of The Philosopher’s Daughter, published by Salmon Poetry in 2013 and a chapbook, Inner Sky from Glass Lyre Press. Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak is her second full-length collection. Her poems have appeared in New Millennium Review, Contemporary American Voices, Best Indie Lit New England, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, The New Verse News, The Mom Egg, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and WORDPEACE, an online journal dedicated to peace and justice. She teaches Literature and Composition at Westfield State University and Holyoke Community College, and Poetry in the Interdisciplinary Studies program for the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program.

Blurbs

Lori Desrosiers’ Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak enfolds in an origami of memory the poet’s life and the lives of her family and others.  As with any fine poetry, the poems mostly transcend clock-time, soaring to a Blakean cleansing of the “doors of perception.”  In vignettes alchemized from everyday experiences, the poet gives us an “eternity in an hour” of music-laced memoir.  Here is an immersion in the dance of a woman who shakes off the shackles of domestic oppression; here is a gentle dreamer who embraces the liberation of being a daring writer.  

--Susan Deer Cloud, Author of Hunger Moon

Opening this new book by Lori Desrosiers you will find of memory and search, of second-thoughts and playful indecisions, poems that go back in time to retrieve music and mend heart.

Indeed, the reader will find all kinds of music here: there is a violin that lacks music and there is a brother's voice that speaks like father's--but not when he sings. There is a reveille at 7.15am, and there is a young baby whose voice is known by her singing. And it is music that brings half-deaf father back from the dead. Page after page the reader will come to learn that it is memory--that beautiful, final chord, which reveals us to ourselves, and yet is unwritten by us.


                                            --- Ilya Kaminsky
                                       -

June 14, 2016 5PM Sharon Shaloo--Executive Director of the Mass. Center for the Book

Sharon Shaloo

Watch this show live at  http://scatvsomerville.org

Sharon Shaloo is the executive director for the Massachusetts Center for the Book, located in Boston. Every year Mass Book presents the Mass. Book Awards that honors writers in the Commonwealth and beyond. A resident of Arlington and member of the town’s Tourism and Economic Development Committee, Shaloo has worked on a literary map of the state, which  includes landmarks from every city and town in the commonwealth. 

Shaloo grew up in New Jersey and earned her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University. She has lived in Indiana, New York City and participated in a teaching exchange in London. When her husband’s career path brought her to the Bay State, she originally moved to Boston, but later chose to settle in Arlington.

Poet and Owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop Ifeanyi Menkiti June 7 5PM

Ifeanyi Menkiti

Born in Onitsha, Nigeria, poet and philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti came to the United States to attend Pomona College, where he wrote a thesis about Ezra Pound. He went on to complete a PhD at Harvard under the great political philosopher John Rawls. Since 1973, Menkiti has taught philosophy at Wellesley College, while continuing his work as a poet. In 2006, he took on yet another role, as proprietor of Harvard Square’s venerable Grolier Poetry Book Shop.

May 24, 2016 Poet Jennifer Martelli

Jennifer Martelli was born and raised in Massachusetts, and graduated from Boston University and The Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. She’s taught high school English as well as women’s literature at Emerson College in Boston.
Her work has appeared, or will appear, in the following publications: The Denver Quarterly, Folio, Calliope, Kalliope, The Mississippi Review, The Bellingham Review, Kindred, Bitterzoet, ZigZag Folio, The Inflectionist Review, Sugared Water, Slippery Elm, Tar River Review and Bop Dead City. She was a finalist for the Sue Elkind Poetry Prize and a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. Her chapbook, “Apostrophe,” was published in 2011 by BigTable Publishing Company.
Link to a recent interview By bopdeadcity
http://bopdeadcity.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/interview-with-jennifer-martelli/