Molly Lynn Watt reads at first presentation of The Poet Populist Reading Series on Sept. 14 at 7 pm at the Cambridge Arts Council

A reading Series at the Cambridge Arts Council every two months featuring poets, and writers of Cambridge, and on occasion special guests. The first presentation is scheduled for Monday September 14, 2009, 7:00 PM. Each presentation will be filmed with the support of CCTV to be aired at the station on future dates. Presented by Jean-Dany Joachim

Molly Lynn Watt, an educator and a poet, curates Fireside Monthly Reading Series, now in its 10th year, serves as poetry editor of HILR Review and Bagels with the Bards Anthologies 1, 2, 3 & 4. She and Daniel Lynn Watt created and perform George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, published on CD, with script to be published later this year by Cervena Barva Press. In 2007 Ibbetson Street Press published Shadow People. She is currently writing a series of poems set in the Civil Rights Movement, is published widely, reads at many venues and was a finalist for the inaugural Poet Populist position in Cambridge.


Philip Burnham grew up in New England, served as Vice Consul in Marseille, France, under JFK, then spend the balance of his professional life teaching Medieval History in the Boston area. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, including The Aurorean an Lyric, and one was recently read on the Writer’s Almanac. I have published four books of poetry, the most recent, A Careful Scattering (Cervena Barva Press, 2007).


Marcia Ross has lived in Scotland, England, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has worked as a radio and print journalist, an antiques dealer, a waitress, typist, editor, and farm stand cashier. She supports a distinguished scientist at MIT and teaches English Literature part time at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poems and essays have appeared in Vanguard, Halifax Magazine, The Fourth Estate Newspaper, Canadian Antiques & Arts Review, and The Dalhousie Review. Ms Ross recently completed a novel, Leda and the Lake, and is working on a collection of poems.

John Clifford is a Vietnam veteran and native of Somerville. While he was in Vietnam’s DMZ, he wrote several poems and left with a Purple Heart. After living in Cambridge for a while, he bought the Green Street Grill, which he owned and managed for 20 years. The creator and director of the Central Square World Fair, he has always been an advocate for the arts and the community.

MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL is a painter, a poet and a short story writer who was born and grew up in Haiti. Her website can be viewed at www.marilenephipps.com. She has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, and at 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 has been a recipient of 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 a finalist for the Walt Whitman prize from the Academy of American Poets). Her poetry was published in England by Carcanet Press Ltd, England in the anthology of seven Caribbean poets titled, “New Caribbean Poetry”.