Author BJ Atwood-Fukuda will read from her fiction at the Woods Hole Public Library on Tuesday, August 16, 2022. It will be her ninth annual Woods Hole reading, featuring several short pieces and/or excerpts from longer ones. BJ’s work appears in, among other places, the anthologies “Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present” and “Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books”. Most recently, parts I and II of her novella, “Nice Piano”, came out in November 2021 and April 2022 on the multimedia site “Witty Partition (wittypartition.org)”.
BJ Atwood-Fukuda lives and works in Spuyten Duyvil, NY (a section of the Bronx, by the Hudson River) and Woods Hole. She has read her work aloud at several places in New York, including Barnes & Noble, the KGB Bar and the Rubin Museum of Art. 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).
BJ 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 Woods Hole Public Library 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.”