Third Thursdays Poetry: September

Jennifer Barber is the current poet laureate of Brookline. Her most recent poetry collection is The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made (Word Works) and her previous collections include Works on Paper, winner of the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize (Word Works), Given Away (Kore Press), and Rigging the Wind, winner of the 2002 First Book Award (Kore Press). She taught creative writing and literature at Suffolk University from 2004 to 2018. She founded the literary journal Salamander in 1992 and served as its editor in chief until 2018.

Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which, Said Not Said, was published by Graywolf Press and named an Honored Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. His earlier collections include Full Moon Boat, The Looking House, and Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead, a selection of early poems by William Stafford and the co-editor with Jennifer Barber and Jessica Greenbaum of Tree Lines, an anthology of contemporary American poems about trees and forests. His work has appeared in a numerous other anthologies, most recently in Braving the Body. He has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) the work of several contemporary Vietnamese poets. Marchant is an Emeritus Professor of English and Founding Director of the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston.

Cheryl Clark Vermeulen is the author of They Can Take It Out and chapbooks Dead-Eye Spring and This Paper Lantern. She received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is Poetry Editor at Pangyrus literary magazine and Visiting Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she founded the Creative Writing Minor. Her poems, translations, or poetry reviews can be found in Drunken Boat, Heavy Feather Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Third Coast, Split Rock Review, among others, and the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She lives in Boston with her family.

Kevin McLellan is the author of: Sky. Pond. Mouth. (winner of the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize selected by Alexandria Peary); in other words you/ (winner of the 2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection selected by Timothy Liu) and Ornitheology (both published by The Word Words); Tributary; Round Trip and the book objects, Hemispheres and [box] which reside in several special collections including the Blue Star Collection at Harvard University. kevmclellan.com/