The Woodberry Poetry Room  invites you to a warm, welcoming midwinter party and vibrant, inspiring reading, featuring poets Sherah Bloor, Nate Klug, Esther K. Heller, KÁNYIN Olorunnisola, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Talin Tahajian. Our popular  Boston Originals  series celebrates the breathtaking range of aesthetics and poetics being practiced by writers who are creating in or around Boston at this time.  
 

Each of our honored guests will read for approximately 8 minutes, then we will all kick back, chat, eat delicious food (catered by Formaggio), listen to music, buy (and share) books, and fortify ourselves for the year ahead. We also invite audience members to bring their own new books, as well as any fliers related to upcoming events, workshops, and/or political demonstrations that they will be hosting or engaged in this Spring.  

 
In-Person Attendance: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, 6:00pm. Free and open to the public. 
 

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the Woodberry Poetry Room YouTube Channel.  

SHERAH BLOOR’s first collection of poems, The Gathering, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in September 2026. She is the co-editor and co-translator of You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine (Copper Canyon & Penguin) and the editor-in-chief of Peripheries: a journal of word, image, and sound (Harvard University Press). 

ESTHER K. HELLER is a poet, artist, PhD student (Comp Lit), and literary critic. She is the author of Ar:range:ments (Fonograf Editions, 2025). Her writing has appeared, among other places, in The Georgia Review, BOMB, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Guardian. 

NATE KLUG is a poet, translator, and essayist. The author of  Rude Woods, a modern translation of  Virgil’s Eclogues (Song Cave, 2013), Anyone (Phoenix Poets, 2015), and Hosts and Guests (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2020), he works as a minister at the First Parish in Lincoln, Massachusetts. 

KÁNYIN OLORUNNISOLA is a Nigerian poet, journalist, and filmmaker. He is the author of Ara’luebo: The Immigrant Monologues (Acre Books, 2026) and the superblack exhibit  (Jackleg Press, 2027). His work has appeared in Al Jazeera, FIYAH, Georgia Review, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from U. of Alabama.

ANNA V.Q. ROSS’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick, won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry, and was named a 2022 Best New Poetry Book selection by the New York Public Library. Recent work appears in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Plume and on The Slowdown. She teaches creative writing at Tufts University.

TALIN TAHAJIAN is from Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, West Branch, The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Oxford Poetry, AGNI, and elsewhere. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale and the assistant poetry editor of The Yale Review. 

 

Persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access may contact Houghton Library's Administrative Coordinator Le Huong Huynh by email or at 617-495-2443 in advance of the workshop.