Enjoy an evening 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 Doug Holder, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and bg Thurston.
The poetry series is hosted by Elizabeth Lund, co-director of Haiku Newton and host of Poetic Lines at NewTV and Bronx TV. 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:
Doug Holder is the former host of the Newton Free Library Poetry Series. He is currently on the Board of the New England Poetry Club, after serving as co-president. Holder is a lecturer in creative writing and Endicott College, and arts editor of The Somerville Times. His poetry and prose have appeared in Rattle, Lilipoh, Worcester Review, Lowell Review, Bay State Banner, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. The Doug Holder Papers Collection is housed at the University at Buffalo Libraries. His latest collection of poetry is I ain’t gonna wait for Godot, no more (Wilderness House Press).
Dzvinia Orlowsky has authored seven poetry collections from Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” and Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. She’s a recipient of a 2019 NEPC Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky for her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna.” For her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s and Halyna Kruk’s poetry, they’ve been short-listed, respectively, for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, and ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry; and more recently for the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation. She’s a founding editor of Four Way Books and Writer-in-Residence for Lasell University’s Solstice MFA in Creative Writing.
bg Thurston lives on a sheep farm in Warwick, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College in 2002. She has taught poetry courses at Lasell Village, online for Vermont College, and conducts poetry workshops. Her third book of poetry, The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm/Tales of a Rural Brothel, was published in 2025 by Cervená Barva Press and is the culmination of a decade of historical research about her 1770’s farmhouse.