Linda McCarriston is from Lynn and never wanted “to be a writer” but always wrote. In school she was one of the newspaper and literary magazine kids, eventually majoring in English and minoring in Secondary Education at Emmanuel College in Boston. With Leslie Hartwell , June Galvin, Carol Glowacki, Alice Hosman and Julianne LaSalla, she day-hopped into Boston, back when you came off the Mystic River Bridge and had 50 yards to get thru three lanes of flat-out bumper to bumper to get to the Storrow Drive exit opposite. In high school she won notice from the Boston Globe as a feature writer and in college from the Atlantic as a poet. She couldn’t get off work to attend the Globe awards ceremony. Her first notable notice was by the New England Poetry Association which awarded its annual Golden Rose Prize to the scandalous Brahmin icon Robert Lowell, along with three area college students. Two were from Emmanuel, of which I was one, under the tutelage of Elizabeth Ring Hanlon. The third came from some ritzy school. After reading, tea was served for Lowell and his potential apprentices. Following exactly the movements of the person before me, I used silver tongs to lift a cube of sugar into my cup before my tea was poured. My poem “Shark,” was vivid and violent, and Robert Lowell liked it. He studied me over his glasses, in the very room of the Harvard Faculty Club where artist Francine Matarazzo and I had waited on table serving a faculty dinner function the night before. And so it went.
Kathleen Aguero’s latest book of poetry is World Happiness Index from Tiger Bark Press.
She has published several other collections of poetry: After That, Daughter Of, The Real Weather, Thirsty Day, and Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth.
She is co-editor of three collections of multicultural literature: A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare. Recipient of a Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kathleen also was awarded a writing grant from the Elgin/Cox Trust.
She has taught at the Writers’ Center at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, the NY State Young Writers’ Program at Skidmore, as well as in the Poets in the Schools Programs of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
In 2004, she held the position of Visiting Research Associate at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. In addition to teaching in the Solstice low residency MFA program, Kathleen teaches for “Changing Lives Through Literature,” an alternative sentencing program based on the power of books to change lives through reading and group discussion. She is a contributing editor in poetry for The Kenyon Review.