A Poetry Reading in Response to Antisemitism

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC. In 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace" for a national campaign for Jewish Heritage Month. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust." 

Jordan Davis's third book, *Yeah, No*, was published by MadHat in 2023. His poems have appeared in Poetry and The New Yorker and his criticism has appeared in The Nation and the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in Brooklyn and works in the financial services industry. 

Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present; a prose memoir entitled Hitchcock Blonde; and two books of translation, most recently, the prize-winning Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Burn and Dodge, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. An NEA Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize Winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, Dolin is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and lives and teaches in New York City. 

Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including To a New Era  (Hanging Loose Press 2021) and the forthcoming Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024). Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Baffler, The Believer,  The Georgia Review,  Fence  and many other journals as well as Best American Poetry 2023, The Pushcart Prize anthology, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day and The Slowdown podcast. She first published with Hanging Loose Press as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022. 

Nada Gordon is a poet who was born in Oakland and lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of: foriegnn bodie, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, V. Imp., Swoon, Folly, Scented Rushes, Vile Lilt, and two more books forthcoming soon!:  The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015, and Emotional Support Peacock. Although she is a multimodal artist, she doesn’t work “at the intersection” of anything; if she did, she would have become a crossing guard.  She is a founding member of the notorious, glorious Flarf Collective and her work has been widely anthologized.  Her poems have been translated into several languages, including French, Japanese, Dutch, Romanian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Burmese. 

Patricia Spears Jones is poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist who migrated from Forrest City, Arkansas to New York City in the 1970s.  She is now the New York State Poet (23-25) and the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon, 2023, A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press,2015)  and three other collections. Her work is anthologized in American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (Library of America 233), Best American Poetry, 2023 and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, 2016. Poems published in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail;  The Ocean State Review, Ms. Muse, CUTTHROAT: A Journal of the Arts, Plume, Tribes, and The Paterson Review. Nonfiction prose in BOMB, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Black Scholar, and Killens Review of Arts and Letters and online journals: www.homeslice and www.pangyrus.org. She edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets. Mabou Mines commissioned and produced “Mother” and Song For New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting. She co-hosts OPEN HOUSE, a Poets House sponsored radio program on wbai.org She was the first person of color to co-curate the Wednesday Night Series for St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1980s. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute. www.psjones.com. 

Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG) & Microliths They are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose (CMP). In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil published Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi literature). Other recent works include A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh & J. Newberger, CMP, 2020), & earlier: Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018). He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, pluridisciplinary artist Nicole Peyrafitte. 

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based Jewish poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, (The Institute of General Semantics Press:  2022), shortlisted for Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA, 2023) and winner of the 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form. (MEA), Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera; Salomé: Woman of Valor CD, (NuJu Records, 2020), and Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking, and has just been appointed Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena KarasickArchive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.  Hot off the press is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, and Ouvert: Oeuvre: Openings, (Lavender Ink Press, 2023).  

Vincent Katz has lived in Manhattan for much of his life, where he often writes poems on the streets and avenues. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, among others, as well as the book of translations The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, which won the National Translation Award. He curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and edited Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, published by MIT Press. Last year, he co-curated a retrospective of the films of Isabelle Huppert at Film Forum in New York.  

Burt Kimmelman's eleventh book of poems, Steeple at Sunrise, appeared in late 2022. His work, often anthologized, has been featured on National Public Radio. His eleven volumes of criticism include, recently, Visible at Dusk (a selection of his essays) and Zero Point Poiesis (a collection of writings on the work of George Quasha, which he edited and introduced). Born and raised in New York City after the Second World War, Kimmelman is now a distinguished professor of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches literary and cultural studies. Interviews of him are available in print, and online as text and video. 

“At age 12 I left England just after seeing van Eyck's "Arnolfini Marriage" and Turner's last paintings. I wondered how they did them. At 13 I began to paint. At 16 I went to Black Mountain College. At 17 I met Pollock. Today, I am writing and painting and still full of my original wonder.” -- Basil King, born London, England 1935, living in Brooklyn since 1969. 

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, painter, photographer, and author, recently of the award-winning poetry collection Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and the 2022 award-winning coedited social justice poetry anthology, Stronger Than Fear. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. Earlier books and honors include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Poetry Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Poetry Prize; the Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; a scholarly study of myth in poetry; award-winning translations; and many others. His work has been featured recently in publications such as Agni, American Literary Review, Chicago Tribune, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, HuffPost, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, The National Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Tampa Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and hundreds of others. Massimilla holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches there and at The New School. 

Sharon Mesmer is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015), was voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy magazine. Other poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Half Angel/Half Lunch and Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). She has also published three fiction collections, The Empty Quarter and In Ordinary Time from Hanging Loose Press and  Ma Vie à Yonago, from Hachette in French translation. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine/The Cut, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Commonweal Magazine, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. 

Uche Nduka - poet, essayist, and collagist- is the author of 14 volumes of poems of which the latest are SCISSORWORK (Roof Books, 2022) and BAINBRIDGE ISLAND NOTEBOOK (Roof Books, 2023). He presently lives in New York City and teaches at Eugene Lang The New School and Queens College.

Mercedes Roffé is one of Argentina's most renowned contemporary poets. Widely published in Latin America and Spain, some of her books were published in translation in Italy, France, UK, Quebec, Brazil, Romania, Lebanon, and the US. Among other distinctions, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001) and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2012) in poetry. Roffé is the founding director of Ediciones Pen Press. 

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022) which won the 2023 National Jewish Book award. He runs a manuscript consultation service at www.seansingerpoetry.com 

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022), which won the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award as well for the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize; The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Her other honors include the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, New England Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an American poet, essayist, and teacher, living in New York City. The daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors in Toronto, Canada. She serves as a board member for Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. 

Anne Tardos is the author of thirteen books of poetry, and editor of three posthumous collections of poetry by Jackson Mac Low. Her work has been translated and published in dozens of anthologies and journals around the world.
Tardos pioneered a unique multilingual writing style, often complementing her texts with video stills, photographs, and collages. Her writing is renowned for its fluid use of multiple languages and its innovative forms. She has worked in numerous media, creating performance pieces, radio plays, videos, and musical compositions. Her multilingual and multimedia works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the West German Radio, WDR; the XLIV Venice Biennale; and in many international sound poetry festivals, including Festival La Bâtie, Geneva; text- ljud Festival, Stockholm; Scene Wien, Vienna; and Zwischentoene, Cologne.
Among her grants, fellowships, and commissions are The Ford Foundation, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. Her works have been commissioned by baritone Thomas Buckner and the Dominque Lévy Gallery. 

Edwin Torres is a NYC native and author of 14 poetry collections including; Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing (Roof Books) which received a 2022 American Book Award > https://www.roofbooks.com/quanundrum-i-will-be-your-many-angled-thing, Xoeteox: the collected word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos), and editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). Multi-disciplinary collaborations with a wide range of cultural nomads have contributed to the development of his bodylingo poetics. He has received fellowships from NYFA, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The DIA Foundation, among others. Anthologies include; New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives, The Difference Is Spreading: 50 Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Aloud: Voices from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Holt).