Event Details


Author B J Atwood-Fukuda will read from her work at the Woods Hole Public Library on Monday, August 10 at 7:30 PM. She lives and works in Spuyten Duyvil, NY (a section of the Bronx, by the Hudson River) and Woods Hole. She has an MFA in fiction writing from The New School (1998), a JD from Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University (1992) and a BA in Italian from Columbia University (1975). B J’s work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present (Scribners, 2003); Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (Subpress, 2004); American Letters & Commentary; and The Mad Hatter’s Review, and Tupelo Quarterly (tupeloquarterly.com), among others. She has read her work aloud at several places in New York, including Barnes & Noble, the KGB Bar and the Rubin Museum of Art, where she currently works as a docent (volunteer guide). This year’s reading will be her third in Woods Hole.

 B J grew up summers with her family in Woods Hole, where her father did research at the MBL and she attended Science School. She recalls, as a young child, spending hours at the WHPL on rainy afternoons, and on evenings when it was open late. “We’d all go down there after dinner—this was a special treat. I found it thrilling to be let loose in front of all those shelves filled with books I didn’t yet know, whole worlds waiting to be explored. I loved the way the pages smelled, the various fonts and how they looked on the page; the titles and how they evoked, or obscured, what lay inside. Illustrations? Sometimes they complemented the words, sometimes they just got in the way of my imagination! The library was a place of enchantment—a treasure-house—where, for a few hours, I could lose myself completely.”

B J’s fiction is not easily categorized. While she has written in the traditional narrative mode, language—with its enormous range of resonances—compels her more. In her current work, all the action happens inside the brain via the eyes and ears of a widely-traveled, anxiety-ridden female character whose relentless self-surveillance in the wake of 9/11 makes for a harrowing, sometimes hilarious ride. Readers, writers and audiences have likened it to a series of jazz riffs. Both “Severe Clear” (last summer’s offering) and “The Longest Journey” (to be read this year) can be found online at www.tupeloquarterly.com.