Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by Assumption College and the Worcester County Poetry Association.

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.

What's more satisfying than leaving work behind on a Friday evening? Rounding out the week with a free virtual writing session, of course! Maximize that Friday night feeling and kick off your writing weekend with us online! Join us for a Friday Night Writes Session on Friday, February 11th, from 5:30pm-6:30pm, and log into GrubStreet Remote for some writing! In 60 jam-packed minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some great writing exercises. Best of all, you’ll sign off with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your evening and beyond. Please make sure to register ahead so we can email you a link to join!

Authors Steven Dunn & Lora Straub read from their work and answer questions. Please join us for this literary arts event! This is a debut reading in Boston for Steven Dunn.
Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016) and water & power (Tarpaulin Sky 2018). He was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy, he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Some of his work can be found in Columbia Journal, Granta Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2018.
Lora Straub lives in Lower Allston, MA. She received her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and was awarded the Judith Lee Stronach Scholarship for Excellence in Poetry by St. Mary’s College of California, where she earned her Poetry MFA. She considers her writing to be hybrid genre and her chapbook, Id Est, was released in October 2017 by SpeCt! Books. Her work can be found in Construction Mag, She Explores, The Fem, The Elephants, Wave Composition, et al.

Please join us for a group discussion of how to write good love poems and how to avoid the common cliches. We'll be reading out loud sections of this article from the Poetry Foundation: How To Write Love Poems That Don’t Suck:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69223/how-to-write-love-poems

The event is on Zoom.

Join us for a fun evening of open mic poetry! We invite you to bring your own works and perform them in front of a supportive crowd. There's no better place to find your voice and share it with the world! 
The sign-up list opens at 6:30 pm in the upstairs cafe and the mic opens at 7:00pm.

• Seating is first come, first served! 
• Each open mic slot gets you about three minutes of stage time.
• No need to memorize your work - just be comfortable and have fun!
• If you read someone else’s work, give credit where due. 
• Above all, show kindness to all. No hate speech, slurs, or sexually explicit language. 

Got a question? Shoot us an e-mail!

Joyce Wilson--- Joyce Wilson, editor of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet since 1997, has taught English at Boston University and Suffolk University. A chapbook of twenty poems inspired by the Fore River Bridge, The Need for a Bridge, was published with Finishing Line Press in March 2019. A full-length manuscript Take and Receive appeared with Kelsay Books in May 2019.

James Najamar --- Lives in Newton. He teaches Victorian literature at Boston College, and edits the scholarly journal Religion and the Arts. His first book of poetry, The Goat Songs. won the Vassar Miller Prize and is being published by the University of North Texas Press this April. A. E. Stallings was the judge.

Ravi Yelamanchili-- His writing has previously been published in the Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Somerville Times, Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, Muse India, and several other journals.

Curated by Doug Holder