Suzanne Berger and Ifeanyi Menkiti

CAMBRIDGE COHOUSING PRESENTS
THE FIRESIDE READING SERIES
MOLLY LYNN WATT, CURATOR

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 • 7:30 pm

Note: Change of date from Jan. 20th to Jan. 21st due to Inauguration celebrations!


Suzanne Berger teaches advanced students in poetry at the Lesley Seminars at Lesley University. She has two books of poetry, These Rooms (Penmaen Press, 1979) and Legacies (Alice James Books, 1984) and a book of non-fiction, Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, AGNI, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and she has received a Pushcart Prize and a grant from the Somerville (Mass.) Arts Council. (11/2003)

Ifeanyi Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria and received his undergraduate degree from Pomona College.After further studies at Columbia and NYU he received his Ph.D in Philosophy from Harvard University. He has taught Philosophy at Wellesley College for more than 30 years, and is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, the oldest poetry book store in the United States.

Menkiti is the author of four collections of poetry, Affirmations (1971), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), and Before A Common Soil (2007). Other poems have appeared in journals and periodicals such as the Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, New Letters, The Massachusetts Review, Stony Brook, Bitterroot, the Southwest Review, and Chelsea. The African journals Okike, Transition and Nigeria Magazine have also carried his work. In 1975, he was honored with a fellowship in poetry from Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities through the Artists Foundation, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The reading begins with a short open mike. Come at 7 PM to help set up, sign up for open mike and nosh and schmooze. Following the reading you are invited to a wine and cheese reception. (A donation of $3 is requested to help with the cost.)

Walden St. bridge is now open!
The Fireside Reading Committee is Molly Lynn Watt, curator, Richard Curran, Jenise Aminoff and Dan Lynn Watt, webmagicians, Julie Rochlin, Lolita Paiewonsky, Debbie Pfeiffer and many others on logistics, and the writers who come month after month. Thank you all for contributing! The reading is held in the living room in front of the fireplace at Cambridge Co-Housing at 175 Richdale Ave, Cambridge, MA 02140, 3 blocks from the Red Line stop at Porter Square. A request to the City of Cambridge allows out-of-town visitors to park on Richdale Avenue from 6:30-10:30 PM. Contact Molly Lynn Watt, 617-354-8242, mollywatt@comcast.net or Jenise Aminoff, 617-576-2004, jenise@alum.mit.edu, or www.cambridgecohousing.org/Fireside/index.html