Jamaicaway Books & Gifts is hosting a series of open mics throughout the summer in conjunction with Jamaica Plain Centre/South Main Streets First Thursday’s community program. The next open mic will be held on Thursday, Sept. 2 at 7PM, and it will be hosted by acclaimed poet Beatrice Greene. Both amateur and experienced writers and poets are welcome to begin signing up to perform family friendly pieces that are less than five minutes long at 6:30PM that day. Also at 6:30 Greene will host an informal open mic workshop for those who need to extra coaching to gain confidence in their public speaking.
Beatrice Greene is a Jamaica Plain-based writer, composer, and pianist. She has been a featured poet at poetry festivals nationwide. Greene is a member of Streetfeet Women, a multicultural women writers’ organization, which recently published the book The Bones We Carry. In 2009 she led a concert of her works and two jazz trios. Greene composed and performed Spirit Warriors, a piano composition commissioned by the United Nations Women’s Reporting Network (WUNRN) in 2005. Her music and writing highlights social justice, spirituality, nature, and science. She holds degrees from Howard University, the College of Wooster and Berklee College of Music.
We will have two featured readers this month.
Alan Smith Soto is a Jamaica Plain resident originally from Costa Rica. He has many published works, including Fragmentos de alcancía, Poetas sin fronteras and Sabia savia. He has published more than fifty poems in various magazines, including Ínsula, Anthropos, International Poetry Review, Abril, Amén and Plaza. His translation of Robert Creeley’s Life and Death was published in 2000. Smith Soto has translated and edited a special issue of the International Poetry Review Spain’s Poetry of Conscience. Smith Soto is also a professor of Spanish literature at Boston University, where he has published various books and articles on Spanish literature. He has read his poetry in various venues, from Jamaica Plain to Madrid, including, more locally, the City Nights series at the Cafe Luna, Cambridge, Chapter and Verse at the Greenough Mansion, and the Jamaicaway Books & Gifts.
Elena Harap is a Jamaica Plain resident who has contributed poems and prose pieces to the anthologies Roxbury Literary Annual, and Summer Home Review, as well as to Sojourner, Jewish Currents, The Boston Poet, Out of Line, Bayou, and Amoskeag. As a member of The Streetfeet Women, a company of writer/performers based in the Boston area, Harap edited and contributed to Many Voices, (1988), The Road to Beijing (1996), Laughing in the Kitchen (1998), and The Bones We Carry (2009). Her radio commentaries have aired on NPR in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She tours “Meet Eleanor Roosevelt,” a one-woman show co-written and -produced with Josephine Lane.
Store Highlight
When Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands were left behind to suffer the ravages of destruction, disease, and even death. The majority of these people were black; nearly all were poor. Displaying the intellectual rigor, political passion, and personal empathy that have won him acclaim and fans all across the color line, Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water offers a searing assessment of the meaning of Hurricane Katrina. With this clarion call Dyson warns us that we can only find redemption as a society if we acknowledge that Katrina was more than an engineering or emergency response failure. What’s at stake is no less than the future of democracy.
