When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Like most kids, I was exposed to and asked to write poetry in elementary school. In middle school and high school we were forced to analyze the genre. For most of that time, I...
On January 27th, 2024, Parker-Vincent Alva was named Boston's next youth poet laureate. Parker-Vincent Alva is a SW@MP (Spoken Word at Mass Poetry) member and a 2023 GrubStreet Teen Fellow, as well as a student and writer from Boston, MA. He writes poetry and prose...
Partner, Boston Office Head, Bain & Company Tamar Dane Dor-Ner is a partner in Bain & Company’s Boston office and a member of the Private Equity, Retail and Brand Strategy Practices. She joined the firm in 1999 and, in addition to Boston, has worked in...
Chief Secretary to Governor Maura T. Healey April English serves as the Chief Secretary to Governor Maura T. Healey. As Chief Secretary, she oversees the administration's efforts to fill appointments on boards and commissions and throughout the administration. Prior...
Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Jill Medvedow is the Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and is recognized as a national leader in the field of contemporary art and civic life. She dramatically...
Executive Director of EMBRACE Boston Imari K. Paris Jeffries is CEO and President of Embrace Boston where he is leading a citywide racial equity movement through The Embrace memorial, the National Embrace Center, and arts and culture centered community organizing...
Deputy managing editor of talent, culture and development at The Boston Globe/founder of A Beautiful Resistance she/her/hers Jeneé Osterheldt is a culture columnist who covers identity and social justice through the lens of culture and the arts. Her work centers Black...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I first encountered poetry when I was in elementary school and then got more exposure to it in middle school. I enjoyed it. Poetry assignments were fun. But that was it. It...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My mother learned many poems by heart and still, at age 92, can recite poetry she learned when she was a child. I am only now realizing how much poetry was a part of my childhood...
Writing While Parenting is a collection of essays that explores the connections between poetry and parenting. How did you discover that you wanted to write about the overlap of these two subjects? Many of these essays come from a monthly column that I started writing...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Both my parents read aloud to me and my siblings when we were small, and so my first experiences with poetry included children’s verses with strong rhymes and narrative...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My mother read poems to me, When We Were Very Young, “James James/ Morrison Morrison/ Weatherby George Dupree/ Took great/ Care of his mother/ Though he was only three” and...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I’ve always loved words, and while I worked professionally as an editor for many years, I didn’t discover until decades later that I might have something of my own to say and a...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I first discovered poetry in middle school. I was drawn to the delightful strangeness of e.e.cummings’ language, the quirky sage voice of Emily Dickenson, and the vivid, dramatic...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? When I was about 18, I developed a weird hunch that I wanted to write poetry, but I didn’t really know how to get started. One problem was that I hadn’t found any poets whose...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I fell in love with poetry in high school but as a reader, not a writer. Over the years I would read poetry, primarily what I think of as the “classics” for well-educated...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, when I was 18. It spoke deeply to something within me that lit this proverbial lamp of remembrance, something about the metaphysics of poetry...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My earliest encounters with poetry were through the Bible. As a young person raised Catholic the poems and songs of that ritualistic life were my first major exposure to...
“What excites me most about Unheard Whispers, my collection of poems on growing up in an alcoholic home, is that part of the proceeds is going to the Robert F. Kennedy Community Alliance here in Massachusetts and their division that helps children and families affected by addiction. In the disease of addiction, so much funding and support go to the addicts themselves. While this is needed, the children of addicts often are forgotten.” — Dianne C. Braley
“IN/DESIDERATO is a book-length poem that, at its heart, is a meditation on the nature of the world we’re leaving behind, both in terms of our collective successes and our failures. The title is a Latinate mangling of my own that loosely translates to ‘un/desirable,’ meaning both the light and dark opposites of that phrasing, and the book is dedicated to and largely addressed to my children.” — Jon D. Lee
“Dear child of the near future, / Here’s my permission. Take it. It’s alright to replace sirens / with the light shot through them. / All the old gray gods have fallen / in a field of decapitated corn stalks. / I’m trying to tell you that the world is beautiful.” — Erica Charis-Molling