Porter Square Books: Boston Edition and GrubStreet are delighted to present the latest installment of the Grubbie Debut event series, featuring Derek JG Williams! Join us for a celebration of his debut poetry collection Reading Water on Wednesday, May 7 at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition (50 Liberty Dr. Boston, Ma 02210). Author Angie Mazakis will join Williams in conversation.

This event is co-presented by GrubStreet and Porter Square Books

Reading Water is the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, chosen by Eduardo Corral (2024). The book considers the elements that make us who we are, and love that’s born then bound by the bonds of family and friends. Its poems undertake a restless search for a self under constant evolution, and are threaded together by images of water’s ephemerality—what happens above and below its surface.

Derek JG Williams is an American writer and the author of Reading Water, selected by Eduardo Corral as the winner of the 2023 Lightscatter Press Prize, and Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022). His poems and prose are published in Pleiades, The Writer’s Chronicle, Plume, Banshee, Salamander, Best New Poets, and  Prairie Schooner, among others. He earned a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He lives in Zurich with his family.

Angie Mazakis’s first book, I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First was chosen by Billy Collins as a finalist for The Miller Williams Prize, published by University of Arkansas Press, and named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Washington Square Review, Mizna and forthcoming in the anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poems. Her essays have been published in The Atlantic and Gulf Coast. She has an MFA from George Mason University and a PhD from Ohio University.

Celebrating over 25 years as the nation's leading and largest independent center for creative writing, GrubStreet is the place where writers develop their craft – and themselves – through the power of writing and sharing their work. GrubStreet offers hundreds of creative writing programs and events for writers from all backgrounds and ages at its Center for Creative Writing in the Seaport, in many Boston neighborhoods, and online. Scholarships are available for all offerings, and many programs are free. At its center, GrubStreet also hosts a community lounge, a podcast studio, Porter Square Books: Boston Edition, and a Writers’ Stage. Learn more at www.grubstreet.org.

Grubbie Debut: Derek JG Williams, author of Reading Water, in conversation with Angie Mazakis