Come hear the hosts of Boston’s Italian American Writers Association Reading Series, Julia Lisella and Jennifer Martelli, exchange poems round-robin style. Before the pandemic, they hosted lively open mics, featured readers, and annual salons at I Am Books in Boston's North End, creating a real community for Italian American writers and lovers of Italian culture. They welcomed both new and established writers to their monthly readings. In March 2020, without skipping a beat, they moved to an online format, joining forces with their sister organization, IAWA New York, over Zoom, but they are looking forward to live events in Boston soon. You can be part of it! Join in a fun game to help discover IAWA’s next live home!  

$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required

Join us for an evening about the perils and rewards of facing and embracing fear, as authors Sandra A. Miller and Erica Ferencik share tales from their own dark woods. There will be a brief exploration exercise to make everyone a little braver, and some inspiration to lead you onto your own path to discovery and treasure. In fact, one lucky participant will even leave with some loot. Erica spent a month in the depths of the Amazon rainforest, researching her novel Into the Jungle. Sandra details a life of treasure hunting and foreign adventures in her memoir, Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure. They are both very brave.

$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required

Bibliomemoir has been described by Joyce Carol Oates as “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.” Put another way, bibliomemoir approaches critical analysis from a personal perspective, removing the glaze of pretension so often found in conventional criticism, and instead examining the act of reading and interpretation as closely as it examines the text itself. In this panel, four writers (Kim Adrian, Adam Colman, Alden Jones, and Kim McLarin) of creative critical texts on books by James Baldwin, Cheryl Strayed, Ben Lerner, and Karl Ove Knausgaard discuss their work and this wonderfully elastic, exploratory genre.

$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required

Local members of Broad Universe, an organization for female and under-privileged gender authors of speculative fiction, present their signature Rapid Fire Reading with authors E. C. Ambrose, Anne E. G. Nydam, Clea Simon, and Sarah Smith! Four authors, eight minutes each--anything could happen!

$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required

GrownUp StoryTime is a session of funny, heartwarming, crazy, amazing stories read aloud. They take short stories (fact, fiction, and everything in between) written by the community, give them to local performers, and funny, heartwarming, exciting storytelling magic ensues. 

$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required

"Voices" is a storytelling show (in the tradition of The Moth) that brings true stories from South Asian immigrants (and their descendants) to the community every other year. Produced by the Bengali theater group “Off kendrik,” a wide-ranging set of tales of social bloopers, emotional scars, cultural isolation, and verbal blunders thins the border between the South Asian diaspora and American life. For this event, five tellers will share short, true stories from their lives as immigrants in America. If time permits, there may also be an open mic for audience members to share their own.

$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required