NEPC @ The Menino: Jennifer Martelli, Roman Johnson, Anastasia Vassos

Join the New England Poetry Club on March 23, as we travel to the Menino Arts Center, in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood! The reading begins at 2:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The Menino Arts Center, located 26 Central Avenue, is an accessible venue, with a wheelchair ramp into the building and an elevator to the second floor. We’re grateful to Home Scholars of Boston for their generous sponsorship.

Roman Johnson, PhD  is a writer and scientist from Memphis, TN. He is a Master of Fine Arts scholar in poetry at Brown University. He has a Ph.D. in Medical Sociology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a M.A. in African American Studies from Georgia State University and obtained a B.A. in Political Science from Morehouse College. He is the co-founder of the New England Hoodoo Society.  He is the current Radical Reversal Poet in Residence at the Suffolk County House of Corrections in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press and other prizes and fellowships. 

Jennifer Martelli 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, 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

The poems of Anastasia Vassos have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. She is the author of Nostos (2023), which was a finalist in Two Sylvias’ and Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contests, and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (2021). Her poems appear online as well as in print journals and anthologies; find her work in RHINO, Whale Road Review, Thrush, Comstock Review, and elsewhere. Her poems about the Greek-American diaspora have been translated into Greek. She is a reader for Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and lives in Boston.