Jim Kates & Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell feature Tuesday October 20, 2009 • 7:30 pm

Cambridge Cohousing Presents

The Fireside Reading Series

Molly Lynn Watt, Curator





JIM KATES is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He translated The Score of the Game by Tatiana Shcherbina, Say Thank You by Mikhail Aizenberg and When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree by Jean-Pierre Rosnay. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He co-translated three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River Press). He is president of the American Literary Translators Association. See www.zephyrpress.org.

MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL is a painter, a poet and a short story writer who was born and grew up in Haiti. She has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and received a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 1993, she won the Grolier prize for poetry. Her poetry collection Crossroads and Unholy Water (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) won the 1999 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (also, finalist for the Walt Whitman prize from the Academy of American Poets). Her poetry was anthologized in New Caribbean Poetry (Carcanet Press Ltd, England), in Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean (Azul Editions, 1996) and The Beacon Best of 1999 (Beacon Press), and has appeared in magazines such as Callaloo, Ploughshares and River Styx. Phipps-Kettlewell’s short story collection, The House of Fossil, was a 2008 finalist for the Flannery O’Connor prize from the University of Georgia Press and for the 2007 Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa; her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2003, as well as listed in The Best American Short Stories 2001. See www.marilenephipps.com.


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.)



The Fireside Reading Committee is Molly Lynn Watt, curator, Richard Curran, webmagician, plus Jenise Aminoff, Vinnie D’Orio, Jim Foritano, Lolita Paiewonsky, Ruby Poltorak, Elizabeth Quinlan, Julie Rochlin, Barbara Thomas and Dan Lynn Watt. Thanks to many others for help on logistics, and the writers who come month after month. The reading is held at Cambridge Co-Housing, 175 Richdale Ave. in Cambridge, 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