Emerson Storytellers Talk Craft at Boston Book Festival

Emerson’s literary alums, faculty, and staff are all over the schedule of this year’s Boston Book Festival, speaking at and moderating events about poetry, fiction, memoir, and genre books.

The BBF will be held Saturday, October 25, in Copley Square, and is presented with support from Emerson College Graduate Programs and WERS 88.9 FM, among many others.

Here’s who you’ll see:

Poetry

Former Boston poet laureate and Assistant Professor Porsha Olayiwola, MFA ‘21 will present The Capability of Negativity: Your Villain Era Poem. Olayiwola is an individual world poetry slam champion, author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too (2019), and a 2020 Academy of American Poets poet laureate fellow.

Ben Pease ’07 will join Ploughshares Editor-in-Chief and Professor Jenny Molberg for Poems & Pints, a hoppy reading and a BBF tradition. Pease is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Chateau Wichman (2016), a “blockbuster in verse”; a Dungeons & Dragons adventure module called “The Light of Mount Horrid”; and Furniture in Space, a hybrid illustrated edition. Molberg is the author of three poetry collections, most recently the Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist The Court of No Record (2023).

Small Press, Big Love: Spotlight on Four Local Presses will feature Janaka Stucky ’00, founding editor of the award-winning press Black Ocean and author of four poetry collections; and Professor Emeritus Pablo Medina, author of the poetry collection Sea of Broken Mirrors (2024) and the novel The Cuban Comedy (2019) among many other books, and a critically acclaimed translator of work by García Lorca and Alejo Carpentier.

Myles Taylor ’18 will take part in Poetry off the Page. Taylor is the current director and board president of the Boston Poetry Slam and former president of the Emerson Poetry Project. Their debut collection, Masculinity Parable (2023) was shortlisted for the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize.

Ploughshares Managing Editor Rachel Dillon will sit on Poetry Makes Us Brave. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Treehouse Climate Action Prize and the BINC Foundation’s Susan Kamil Scholarship, Dillon’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the AAP’s Poem-A-Day, the Asheville Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Poet Lore, among other outlets.

Fiction

Senior Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Jessica Treadway, author of four novels and three short story collections had a story selected for the 2025 edition of The Best American Short Stories. She will join a panel discussion about the anthology and its writers, and she won’t be the only Emersonian on the panel. Nicole Lamy ’94, series editor for The Best American Short Stories and former books editor of the Boston Globe, will join her. And novelist Heidi Pitlor, MFA ’97, series editor for the 2007-2024 editions of The Best American Short Stories, will moderate.

Writer and high school teacher Allie Tagle-Dokus ’15 will participate in Comic Rites of Passage. Her debut novel, Lucky Girl (Tin House, 2025) is due out in November.

Tatiana Johnson-Boria, MFA ’20 will moderate the panel, House of Secrets: Power, Money & the Unquiet Self. Johnson-Boria is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in Poetry.

Affiliated faculty member Alex George will moderate History and Secrets: The Family Ties that Bind. George is a bookstore owner, founder of the Unbound Book Festival, and author of the novels A Good American (2012), Setting Free the Kites (2017), and The Paris Hours (2020).

And Emerson College Graduate Programs is sponsoring the panel Fates Entwined: Changing Fortunes and Futures.

Nonfiction

Nicole Graev Lipson, MFA ’22, author of the USA Today national bestselling memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (2025), will sit on the panel Memoir: The Life-Changing Power of Literature. Lipson’s work has been chosen for The Best American Essays, awarded a Pushcart Prize, and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award.

Professor Emerita Megan Marshall will join the panel Memoir: On Writing the Lives of Others and Ourselves. Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2014), as well as The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2006), a Pulitzer finalist; Elizbeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (2017); and most recently, the memoir After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (2025).

Genre/YA

Affiliated faculty member Fin Leary, MA ’17, editor of the upcoming science fiction anthology Future States of Stars (2026), a contributor to the young adult horror anthology These Bodies Ain’t Broken (2025), and a 2024 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices Fellow for Young Adult Fiction is a panelist on Horror: The Body as Villain or Hero.

Andrea Martucci ’08, MA ’12, host of the Shelf Love podcast and a Substack about romance novels, will moderate a conversation with Julia Quinn, author of the Bridgerton novels, now a hit Netflix series, for the BBF Romance Keystone.

Affiliated faculty member Rachel Kim Raczka, arts editor and writer of the Boston Globe’s wedding column, “The Big Day,” will moderate the YA panel Fandom Hijinks.

Publishing

Affiliated faculty member Alysia Abbott is the author of the ALA Stonewall Award-winning memoir Fairyland (2013), now a major motion picture produced by Sofia Coppola.  She will moderate Unbound: From Workshop to Book Deal, which will feature Global Pathways instructor Theresa Okokon, an award-wining writer, storyteller, and teacher, and author of the essay collection Who I Always Was (2025).