GRS Readers for 2/17

Posted by on February 13, 2012 No comments

Looking for something to do this Friday? Come to the Graduate Reading Series! (7PM, Beard Room). Here’s who’s reading this week.

Susannah Clark is doing the E Street Shuffle.

Elizabeth Christensen likes the word cacophony and eating whole avocados with a spoon. She’ll be reading fiction.

Thea Engst hails from Fabius, New York. She grew up on her father’s dairy farm but hates cheese. She’s currently working on her thesis, writing poems about family, travel, current events but never about cheese.

Luke M. Jones is a jack of all trades and not quite a master of any of them. So avant garde it’s just plain weird? Improbably ’80s sci fi? 10 pages about a lampshade? Don’t put anything past Luke. Well, maybe not the lampshade…

Jon McConnell writes fiction, and then he reads it.

Elizabeth Pashley is a second year MFA student in fiction, though perhaps she is better known for her gut tickling non-fiction and Vogonesque poetry. When she is not saving kittens from trees or serenading the homeless with her ukulele, she contemplates the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, since she has yet to find the question. Elizabeth will be reading fiction. Probably.

Readers for 2/17!

The Graduate Reading Series Kicks Off Spring 2012 With TWO Awesome Events

Posted by on January 31, 2012 No comments

The Graduate Reading Series is back! Since you all must have missed us so much over the break, we decided to jump-start Spring 2012 with a double booking of GRS events! That’s right, you get to see Shannon and Emily’s smiling faces TWICE in one glorious night! Oh, and you also get to attend two very different but very cool events.

The first event is our first ever (and hopefully annual) Literary Agent Panel. Like the Grants and Residencies Panel of the fall, it’s a networking and professional development event. Come hear Boston-based literary agent Lorin Rees discuss how to catch an agent’s attention and what it’s like to work with one. After the discussion, there will be a question and answer period, so come with questions! Lorin has also graciously offered to meet one-on-one with 15 lucky participants from the panel. Sign-ups for this opportunity will take place at the end of the event, which runs from 5-6pm and will be held in Walker 202 this Friday, 2/3/12. The individual meetings will take place on Thursday 2/9 between 1 and 5 pm.

Our second event of the night is our First Reading for Spring 2012. We’ve got a great menu and an even better line up. Check them out below. The reading will be in the Beard Room at 7PM, this Friday (2/3).

Lea McLellan is a first year nonfiction student at Emerson College. Lea has been published in Seven Days: Vermont’s Alternative Newsweekly and she was a blogger for Asia Society in New York. She was the editor-in-chief of the University of Vermont’s alternative newspaper, The Water Tower for three, glorious years. She is also pretty fun to hang out with…she thinks.

 Rebecca Podos is a fiction writer. She enjoys things, and works for the Rees Literary Agency, where you should all send your work for her to read. Rebecca@reesagency.com

 Zaynah Qutubuddin is from Richmond, Virginia and even though her family wants her back after she graduates in May, she plans to remain in Boston for a little while longer. Beyond that plan to not move (except possibly to a new apartment), she is not entirely sure what she will be doing. But that’s okay because she is currently excited to complete her collection of short stories for her fiction thesis and is enjoying being an editorial intern at the Pohly Company.

 Ricky Davis is a daddy. And a bear. He is a daddy bear. He’s also a second year MFA student who enjoys writing prose and poems about strange things happening to ordinary people. His work has appeared in Prick of the Spindle, Phantom Kangaroo and Scissors & Spackle. And he has small hands. Very small hands.

Marlena Clark is in her second year of the MFA program for Fiction. If you need to find her, she’ll be in the library, in the super secret room o’ carrels where it is actually quiet.

Amanda Hartzell strings words together and has yet to master optical illusions.  She’ll be reading fiction.

Our Readers for 2/3!

 

GRS Readers for 10/21

Posted by on October 21, 2011 No comments

Introducing the readers for October 21, 2011, which will be held in the Multipurpose Room of the Campus Center at 7pm:

Kelly Addams is a fiction writer and a first-year MFA student. She wishes she had something witty to say, but bios make her nervous. So she will just say that she will be reading two very short stories and she hopes they will not disappoint.

Sarah Chaves is a 22 year-old first year MFA creative writing: nonfiction student. For the past four years she’s been working on a memoir titled Don’ Be Scare’ about her father. Her best friend is her fourteen-year-old brother Lucas. Besides obsessing over the next episode of Glee, they enjoy singing Lady Gaga songs and making pasta.

Nicole DiCello lives in central Massachusetts. An Ithaca College graduate, Nicole cut her teeth in The Workshop for Publishing Poets led by Barbara Helfgott Hyett in Brookline, MA. Nicole’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Guard, Poetry East, Nimrod, Soviet Peaches, Concho River Review, and Ballard Street Journal. Earlier this year she won 2nd place in the Blue Mesa Review poetry contest judged by Lisa Gill, Danny Solis, and Richard Vargas. She was also one of 12 poets chosen by Marge Piercy for a weeklong poetry workshop on Cape Cod in 2012. She’s a reader for Ploughshares.

LuzJennifer is a second year MFA fiction student at Emerson. Before coming to grad school, she worked as a reporter for the Hispanic press and as a freelance writer in Providence, RI.

Grace Schauer is a third-year poet fresh from two years’ temporary retirement in South Florida, a stint for which she has nothing to show but an incredibly unflattering driver’s license photo.

Laura Tetreault is a second-year nonfiction MFA student at Emerson. In her writing, she is interested in combining the academic and the creative, the investigative and the lyric, the serious and the just plan weird. She teaches in the First-Year Writing Program at Emerson, tutors in the WARC, and also works as an editorial assistant for the Journal of Asian and African Studies. In her almost-nonexistent free time, she likes to read a lot of books, drink a lot of coffee, and put together outfits involving as many bright colors as possible without looking completely like a five-year-old. At this GRS, she will be reading some combination of nonfiction and poetry.

GRS Readers 10/7

Posted by on October 7, 2011 No comments

Bill Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont, 7pm.

Amanda Hartzell has been elevator-trapped in Stillwater, Oklahoma; rock-stranded in Pennsylvanian quarries; and happily lost in southwest cities with diners open past three a.m. She is a second-year MFA fiction writer. She plans—in a round-about fashion—on running away to geography with lighthouses and accents.

TJ Staneart is a second year Fiction writer from Minnesota. His work has been rejected by Tin House, The Missouri Review, and many more; he does not have a story appearing in the New Yorker next month. He is unhappy and currently works in a bar.

Jon McConnell is a fiction writer from Pennsylvania, where they wear flannel unironically and eat scrapple at tractor pulls. And, by God, he loves ‘em for it. Just, not enough to stay.

Joshua White is from Arizona. He writes stories.

Mandala Scott is from Texas but not at all Texan. She likes green mangoes and small birds. One time she went to the Creation Museum and rode a dinosaur. She’ll probably read fiction.

Becca Podos is a mystery star.

GRS Readers for 9/23

Posted by on September 23, 2011 No comments

Tonight at 8pm in the Beard Room (Little Building, 80 Boylston), the below Emerson writers will read from their flame scrolls.

LP is a third-year fiction MFA student who teaches in the FYWP and Emerson Writes, along with working as a Calderwood Fellow in Snowden International High School’s Writing Center. Writing and teaching writing are just two of LP’s passions — she also freelances as a graphic designer and is heavily involved in the Boston Ultimate scene. A native to Boston, LP’s accent is an amalgamation of her local roots, her attempts to mask aforementioned roots, her time spent in Upstate New York, and her uncanny ability to unintentionally adopt the speech patterns / dance moves of people she observes. She admires Kurt Vonnegut, reads too many comic books, and is simultaneously in the running for both Team Bro and Team Hipster on her mixed club team. She blames the hipster nomination on her glasses, her Subaru, and her ties with Emerson College.

Zaynah Qutubuddin was not originally supposed to be here at Emerson. She was supposed to be in medical school saving lives. After years of studying amino acid structures, chemical formulas, and anatomical structures of various animals, her brain died. It only revived when she applied for the MFA program and began to take up writing again. Now she plans to save lives in another way: through her written work. Zaynah was born in Manhattan but grew up in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia where she also attended Virginia Commonwealth University for undergrad as an English major with a double minor in Biology and Chemistry. She has a lot of random experience such as helping elderly Parkinson’s Disease patients exercise, teaching children how to build rockets, organizing large-scale banquets, and volunteering for the Richmond Marathon for years but never once running it. This is her second year in the MFA Fiction program and she plans to graduate in May 2012 with the hope of publishing soon.

Charlotte Seley is a unicorn inside a shot gun inside a rest stop in Ohio inside a puddle of fried chicken grease inside a tender little girl who undoes poems like a daisy and lays the petals out like a $14.95 all you can eat chinese buffet. This is her second year offering Emerson College her cantankerous charm and someone made her the poetry editor of Redivider but they’re gone now. Long long gone now.

Dave Snyder is not comfortable writing about himself in the third person. Dave Snyder decides to try the second person. You feel strange. You find it disconcerting to address yourself like this. You wonder how others will respond. You bail, decide to try the first person. Plural. We think this is no better. We think this comes across as pompous at best. “They?” we think. No. They don’t even know what’s going on any more. It’s nonsense. Dave Snyder agrees, signs off.

Graham Trail (b.1986) is an American studying fiction at Emerson College. He is the founding editor of The Ear Hustler, an online literary magazine.