Poetry Reading & Open Mic

About

Join us for an afternoon of poetry at the Library. This poetry series meets in September, November, February, and April. Each event features readings by three prominent, published poets, followed by an open mic. All attendees are welcome to participate in the open mic. Sign up for the open mic at the reading, limit of one short poem per person. This month's featured poets are Nidia Hernández, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Richard Waring. The poetry series is hosted by Elizabeth Lund, co-director of Haiku Newton and host of Poetic Lines at NewTV and BronxNet Television. Elizabeth also interviews major poets for The Christian Science Monitor. From 2015 through 2019, she wrote a monthly column about poetry for The Washington Post . About the featured poets: Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project lamajadesnuda.com won the 2011 world Summit Awards, and her radio program (also called La Maja Desnuda) has presented works from the last 35 years with more than 1,820 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM Spain. She curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press), is a co-editor for Mercurius Magazine, a UK publication based in Barcelona, Spain, and belongs to the Board of Directors of New England Poetry Club. Hernández is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light by Rafael Cadenas. In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, for which she which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award. Dzvinia Orlowsky is author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her collections include Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” selection, and Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list and a finalist for the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award. She’s received two Pushcart Prizes and a Samuel Washington Allen Prize for her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna.” With Ali Kinsella, she has co-translated Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize and a Griffin International Poetry Prize finalist; Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living, a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship recipient and PEN America Literary Award finalist; and Oleksander Dovzhenko’s The Enchanted Desna (Lost Horse Press, 2026). Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books and Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. She is recipient of the 2026 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize in Poetry and Poetic Translation. Richard Waring’s poems have appeared in Ars Medica, Coin Flip Shuffle, The Ekphrastic Review, Appalachia, Collateral, the American Journal of Nursing, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among other publications. He has been anthologized in Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains, What the Poem Knows, and The Unitarian Universalist Poets: A Contemporary American Survey. His first book of poetry, What Love Tells Me, was published by Word Poetry in 2016. A second, Small Beauties, was published by Kelsay Books in 2026. He attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, where he studied the poetry of William Carlos Williams with Allen Ginsberg and had workshops with W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and others. Richard hosts a monthly poetry reading, the PoemWorks series, founded by Barbara Helfgott Hyett, whom he likes to say “raised him from a couplet." Until recently, he was senior layout artist for the New England Journal of Medicine.