Please allow us the pleasure of introducing our 2014 Fellows!
Anthony D’Aries, the Writers’ Room of Boston Fellow in nonfiction, is the author of The Language of Men (Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press, 2012), which received the PEN/New England Discovery Award and was named Memoir of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. He has taught literacy and creative writing in the Massachusetts Department of Corrections and is currently Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Regis College.
Ivan Gold Fiction Fellow, Miriam Cook hails from the rainy wilds of the Pacific Northwest. She migrated to Boston to pursue an MFA in Fiction at Emerson College where she writes stories that draw on her western roots and sensibility. Outside of class, she works as a Marketing Assistant for Ploughshares at Emerson College, engaging with the literary community through social media and the Ploughshares Blog. She also teaches playwriting to Boston public high school students through the emersonWRITES program and assists in coordinating the Breakwater Reading Series. In her free time, Miriam practices shotokan karate, throws dinner parties, and writes an epistolary food blog with her father.
A lifelong resident of Massachusetts, Jane Poirier Hart, the Writers’ Room of Boston Fellow in poetry, has made her home primarily in the southeast, where she is inspired by the nature outside her windows, Cape Cod’s beaches and back roads and–when she can get it–far-flung travel. Her poetry is inflected with music–she has a degree in music composition from Berklee College of Music–and syntax borrowed from years of studying American Sign Language. Jane was a 2012 nominee for the anthology, Best New Poets, and a 2010 resident at the Frost Place, and her poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, The Worchester Review, Mosquito and Poetry Nights. Jane holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and when she’s not writing poems or reading them, she cooks, complains about grocery shopping, and dreams of sewing lovely but practical objet d’art.
Ellin Sarot, the Gish Jen Fellow for Emerging Writers, was born and raised in New York City, and during World War II her mother’s parents bought an abandoned farmhouse sitting in 73 acres in upstate New York, between Fleischman’s and Pine Hill. After teaching high-school and college English, she became the editor with a science group, then a technical group, and then on a medical publication, stopping, except for free-lance work, on becoming disabled. “When I was fourteen I said to myself I was a poet ,” she writes, “and, despite vicissitudes and exigencies, that has not changed. My project at the Writers’ Room of Boston is to put together a first collection of my poems.” Ellin has published poems in journals such as Chaminade Literary Review, Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, The Little Magazine, and The Beloit Poetry Journal.
