The Woodberry Poetry Room invites you to this dynamic marathon-reading (and Poetry Homecoming party), featuring readings by Sean Cole, Octavio González, Antonio Ochoa, Ted Pearson, Trace Peterson, and Eleni Sikelianos.

This episode of our popular Boston Originals series will focus on the breathtaking range of aesthetics and poetics being practiced by writers, who are working, dwelling, and/or creating in or around New England at this time. 

Each of our honored guests will read for 10 minutes, then we will all kick back, chat, eat food, listen to music, buy (and share) books, and fortify ourselves for the challenging and consequential year ahead. We also invite audience members to bring their own new books/mags, as well as any fliers or publicity materials related to upcoming events, workshops, and/or demonstrations that they will be hosting or engaged in this Fall. 

In-Person Event: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330. Free and open to the public.


ABOUT THE READERS:
 

Sean Cole is the author of After These Messages  from Lunar Chandelier Press. His poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Black Clock, Court Green, Boog City and other journals. For more than 25 years he’s worked as a producer and reporter for various public radio shows and podcasts. He is currently a supervising producer and occasional guest host of “This American Life.” He hails from the Boston area.
 

Octavio González is Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professor of Humanities and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. His first poetry collection, The Book of Ours, was a selection of the chapbook series of Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame (2009). Limerence (Rebel Satori Press, 2023) is his first book-length poetry collection. 
 

Antonio Ochoa is the author of the poetry collections pulsos (Mexico: Libros de Umbral) and El toro de Hiroshima (Mexico: Mangos de Hacha). His book Small Sargassum Mountains/Pequeñas montañas de sargazo is forthcoming from Nightboat.The host of the podcast Texts For Nothing: Conversations with Poets, Ochoa was born in Mexico City and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 

Ted Pearson is was born and raised in Palo Alto, California. He began writing poetry in 1964 and has since published thirty books, most recently Chamber Music (Shearsman Books, 2024). He now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
 

Trace Peterson is is a poet, editor, and literary scholar. Her poetry books are The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep, which won the Alma Book Award and is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2025, as well as Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2019). Editor of the award-winning journal and small press EOAGH and co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat, 2013), she is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UConn, Storrs.
 

Eleni Sikelianos: Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the Pacific ocean, and now lives in Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages, with twelve books to her name, most recently Your Kingdom (Coffee House, 2023).


Past readers in the Boston Originals series include: Daniel Bouchard, Kate Colby, Ruth Lepson, Chloe Garcia Roberts, Tanya Larkin, Sandra Lim, Audrey Mardavich, Clint Smith, Keith Jones, Gail Mazur, Jill McDonough, David Rivard,Oni Buchanan, Jim Dunn, Boyd Nielson & Natalie Shapero, Joshua Bennett, David Blair, Steph Burt, Lloyd Schwartz, Susan Barba, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Michael Franco, Andrew K. Peterson, Adrienne Raphel, Jennifer Tseng, Jon Woodward, Carol Weston, Peter Gizzi, Kythe Heller, Kevin McLellan, Jackie Wang, Edwin Alanís-García, Joshua Bell, Jessica Bozek, Sam Cha, Kevin Holden, Caroline Knox, John Mulrooney, Chibuihe Obi Achimba, Kristen Case, Amanda Cook, Danielle Legros Georges, Suzanne Mercury, Oliver Strand, Janaka Stucky, Andrea Cohen, Amanda Gorman, Porsha Olayiwola, Ariana Reines, James Stotts, Toni Bee, Krysten Hill, Sawako Nakayasu, Linda Norton, Heather Treseler, Margo Lockwood, Carolina Ebeid, Shangyang Fang, Elisa Gabbert, Christianne Goodwin, Steven Karl, and Patrick Pritchett.