Celebrate Poetry with Cambridge Arts


3/25/2016 • 8 years ago

caution sign The information on this page may be outdated as it was published 8 years ago.

National Poetry Month
Cambridge Arts invites you to engage with poetry! Our first annual community open mic will be held on April 11, 2016 to celebrate National Poetry Month. The event will be held amidst the vibrant visual poetry of Lisa Houck’s artwork in Cambridge Arts Gallery 344. 

Poet and community activist Toni Bee kicked off our new Poetry Ambassador program this past December with an exploration of parenthood at Central Square Library. Our 2016 Poetry Ambassadors are hard at work organizing engaging community events including a poetry-jazz collaboration at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, an exploration of attention and awareness in verse, and a program giving voice to LGBTQIA poets. Poetry Ambassador programs will resume in May and will continue with one event per season through 2016. 

National Poetry Month Open Mic

April 11, 2016, 6:00-8:00pm
Cambridge Arts Gallery 344
344 Broadway, 2nd Floor 
Cambridge, MA 02139
First annual Community Open Mic in honor of National Poetry Month
Sign-up for a three-minute reading slot starting at 5:30pm 

Meet the 2016 Poetry Ambassadors

Spring - Mary Buchinger

 

Mary Buchinger BodwellMary Buchinger is the author of Aerialist (Gold Wake Press, 2015; shortlisted for the May Swenson Poetry Award, the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize, and the Perugia Press Prize) and Roomful of Sparrows, (Finishing Line Press, 2008).  She is the featured poet in Border Crossing (Fall 2015) and The 3288 Review (Fall 2015) and one of three women poets in Words to Cure the Tameness (White Knuckle Press). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Booth, Caesura, Cortland Review, DIAGRAM, Existere (Canada), Fifth Wednesday, Ibbetson Street, New Madrid, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Orbis (England), PANK, RUNES: A Literary Review, SAND (Germany), Salamander, Silk Road Review, Slice Magazine, Solstice, The Massachusetts Review, Upstairs at Duroc (France), Versal (The Netherlands), and elsewhere; she was invited to read at the Library of Congress, received the Daniel Varoujan Award and the Firman Houghton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Originally from rural Michigan, she served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador and holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from Boston University. Buchinger (Bodwell) is Associate Professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University in Boston, Massachusetts where she teaches interpersonal communication, creative and expository writing. She is a member of NoCA (North Cambridge Arts) and lives in the Porter Square neighborhood with her husband and two sons, their dog and two cats.

Summer – Nadia Colburn


Nadia ColburnNadia Colburn is a writer, teacher and coach interested in the intersection of personal and social transformation. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia and a BA from Harvard and has taught literature and creative writing at MIT, Lesley, Stonehill College, where she was a visiting writer, and in popular workshops throughout New England. Her poetry and prose have been published in more than sixty national publications including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Slate, The Boston Globe Magazine, Yes! Magazine, The LA Review of Books, Harvard Magazine and many other places. For many years Nadia ran the popular Cambridge poetry series, and she founded Continuities: Readings and Discussions, which paired local poets with activist in such fields as the environment and trauma work. She is a founding editor at Anchor Magazine: where spirituality and social justice meet, a certified Kundalini yoga instructor, and an OI aspirant in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist Plum Village Tradition. Nadia is interested in bringing the benefits of mindfulness and mind-body awareness to wider audiences and in exploring the relationship between mindfulness and creativity. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children. www.nadiacolburn.com

Fall – Jade Sylvan

Jade SylvanJade Sylvan, called a “risque queer icon” by The Boston Globe, is an award-winning author, poet, screenwriter, producer, and performing artist heavily rooted in the literary and performance community of Cambridge and Somerville. Jade’s most recent book, Kissing Oscar Wilde (Write Bloody, 2013), a novelized memoir about the author’s experience as a touring poet in Paris (sponsored by a travel grant from The Foundation of Contemporary Arts), received rave reviews and was a finalist for the New England Book Award and the Bisexual Book Award. Jade has toured extensively, performing their work to audiences across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Currently, Jade is writing and producing an original full-length musical, Spider Cult the Musical, premiering June 24-26, 2016 at Oberon Theater in Harvard Square.