"Listening to poets read their work in the barn, you can almost feel Frost’s presence..."
2016 Hyla Brook Reading Series
Join a community of poets and poetry lovers who gather in the intimate setting of Robert Frost's barn to hear nationally-acclaimed poets read their work. Except for June, readings begin Thursdays at 6:30pm, include a reading by a Hyla Brook poet before the featured reader and are followed by an open mic. All readings are free and open to the public. For easy reminders, click the icons at bottom of the page and follow us on social media.
Anton Yakovlev - May 19
Originally from Moscow, Russia, Anton Yakovlev lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey and works as a college textbook editor. He studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University. His work is published or forthcoming in The New Yorker, Fulcrum, American Arts Quarterly, Measure, The Raintown Review, The New Verse News and elsewhere. He is the author of chapbooks Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015) and The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Yakovlev co-hosts the Carmine Street Metrics reading series in New York City. He has also directed several short films.
Frost Farm Prize winner (TBD) & Timothy Steele - June 12 (7pm)
Kevin Durkin, winner of the 5th Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry, is our featured reader. Durkin's poems have appeared in Poetry, New Criterion, Yale Review, and the anthologies Poetry Daily, Able Muse Anthology, Irresistible Sonnets, and Measure for Measure. Finishing Line Press published his first collection of poetry, Los Angeles in Fog, in 2013. Judge Joshua Mehigan said the winning poem, "Meteor Crater,' is unmistakably about the stark beauty and sublime power of the natural world." In addition to receiving a $1,000 prize, Durkin will join Mehigan in opening our inaugural "Writing in Meter and Form" conference as our guest. A.M Juster, Deborah Warren and Alfred Nicol will follow with a faculty reading.
This year's judge Joshua Mehigan's first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP), was a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Mehigan's second book, Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was cited in the TLS, The New York Times Book Review as a 2014 best book of the year. He is the recipient of Guggenheim Foundation (2015) and National Endowment for the Arts (2011) fellowships. In addition to opening our conference with Durkin, Mehigan will also be instructing. Note: June 12th is a Friday.
Alice Fogel - July 14
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a writer and professor, teaches English & Creative Writing at Fordham University and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She is also a regular columnist for America magazine. O’Donnell has published four collections of poems, Saint Sinatra (2011), Moving House (2009), Waking My Mother (2013), and Lovers’ Almanac, the latter just out in Spring of 2015. She has also published two chapbooks MINE (2007) and Waiting for Ecstasy (2009). Other titles include Mortal Blessings (2014), a memoir, and Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith, a brief biography and introduction to O’Connor’s work (May 2015). Readers can visit her on the web at http://angelaalaimoodonnell.com/.
Maggie Dietz - August 13
Maggie Dietz’s book of poems Perennial Fall (University of Chicago Press) won New Hampshire’s 2007 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. For many years she directed the national Favorite Poem Project, and is coeditor, with Robert Pinsky, of three anthologies related to the project: Americans’ Favorite Poems, Poems to Read and An Invitation to Poetry (all published by W.W. Norton & Co.). Her poems appear widely in journals such as Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Agni, and Salmagundi. She teaches in the creative writing concentration at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her new book That Kind of Happy is due out in April 2016.
Bill Coyle - September 10
Bill Coyle's poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, the New Republic, Poetry, and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. His collection of poems, The God of This World to His Prophet, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published in 2006. His translations from the Swedish have appeared in journals such as Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry and World Literature Today and he was awarded a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a doctoral student at Boston University’s Editorial Institute.
