Wicked Good Poetry Salon

Join us for an evening of poetry featuring authors from the Mass Poetry Festival! It's free and there will be refreshments.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Barbara O’Dair graduated from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She was chosen by the late Tom Lux as the winner of the Mudfish 9 poetry contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Semiotexte, Wisconsin Review, Alaska Quarterly, and Nerve and in several anthologies. She also has had a long career in journalism and has written for The New York Times and Time magazine and edited at Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She lives in the New York City area with her family.

Brandel France de Bravo’s third collection of poems, Locomotive Cathedral, was chosen in the Backwaters Press contest for publication by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2025. Her poems have recently appeared in Best American Poetry,
32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the DC Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Brandel is from Washington, D.C., and teaches a meditation program developed at Stanford University called Compassion Cultivation Training.© You can read more about her and her work at www.brandelfrancedebravo.com

Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them), is the author of five collections of poetry including, A Brief History of My Sex Life, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books, the Lambda Literary finalist, Transitory, 2023, winner of the BOA Editions, Ltd. Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry; Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2023, released in an expanded second edition in the summer of 2024. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Subhaga is a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Their work appears in a variety of print and online journals including The Diode Poetry Journal, TheBellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Smartish Pace, and others. A Queer elder, they live in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land.

Jennifer Martelli (she/her) has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Braving the Body Anthology, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, Diode, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and My Tarantella, which was also shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and named finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com