Saturday, April 9, 2011
Unless aliens descend from outer space and steal her thesis manuscript, Katie Vagnino will receive her MFA in poetry from Emerson College in just under two weeks. In addition to poems, Katie writes event and restaurant blurbs for the Time Out Boston website, witty posts for her blog (The Vagnino Monologues), and frenzied love letters that she rarely sends. She also teaches wide-eyed Emerson freshmen how to write and waits tables just down the street at Lineage. Her poems have appeared in The Furnace Review, Merge, nibble, nthWORD, The Raintown Review, The Road Less Taken, and Waterways and are hopefully forthcoming in a bunch of other places (maybe even some that you've heard of) soon. She lives in Allston with her muse, a fat diabetic calico cat named Maude.
Sarah Banse originally hails from southern Vermont but has been muddling through in the western suburbs of Boston with her four children for the past sixteen years. She is a recovering attorney who finally after finding fiction realizes why she hated the law so much. Namely, precedent; you can't say it unless someone has said it before you. She is an assistant editor at Ploughshares. Her work has recently been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, The Boston Globe and Errant Parent. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories entitled Self-Storage.
Originally from Malaysia, Crystal has lived in South Carolina, Texas, and Connecticut and is happy to be settled (for now) in Jamaica Plain with a husband, pet cat, and three roommates. She is in her second year in the MFA program at UMass Boston where she also teaches undergraduate creative writing. Next month, she and a team of fellow UMass grad students will be launching a new postcard literary journal called ripple(s) and attempting to break the world record for most postcards sent from a single location at one time.
Lisa Hiton is a poet at Boston University's MFA program. She loves the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Richard Siken, so if you aren't an emotional cutter, you probably will not enjoy this reading. Also if you are anti-semetic, you will probably not enjoy this reading. You don't know Lisa from Yale Younger Poets Award or the New Yorker but it's likely that you've run into her at Sweat and Soul Yoga or Eastern Standard. She will probably go there after this reading and drink multiple aviations. Lisa is from Chicago. She wants to be a filmmaker and poet, but for now, she just loves teaching her class at BU.
Sam Cha likes telling teh truth, but can't help embellishing. ALso, bios give him writer's block.
Elisabeth Houston lives in Cambridge. She graduated from Yale, where her coursework focused on a race, class, and gender. Currently an MFA student in poetry at Boston University, she is also a Cave Canem Fellow.