Reading

Until recently, Jewish poetics have largely been seen as parochial, disconnected from both conversations about aesthetics and general cultural trends. Recently, a widespread interest in diasporas and migrations have brought new ways of viewing Jewish poetics, allowing us to examine them as both a contemporary phenomenon, and an ancient written tradition. Midrash is a poetic technique invented more than two thousand years ago to derive text from given text. In this panel, four practitioners of "Jewish poetry" will read from their own work, and the work of other Jewish poets, and comment on the new/old technique of midrash and what it brings to our contemporary strangeness. We will discuss how Jewish history informs today’s poetics, and how the Jewish poetry of today provides essential commentary on the broader culture.

As a regional small press focused on the Mid-South, we are eager to explore the ways that this in-between part of the country relates to more established regions like the South/Deep South and the Midwest. We are especially interested in supporting work by writers from states that border our home base of Arkansas to explore conversations across our borders. This reading features three of our current/forthcoming Louisiana poets: Nikki Ummel, Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo, and Alison Pelegrin.

BlazeVOX Books, based in Buffalo, New York, has presented wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry since its founding in 2000 by Geoffrey Gatza. Coal Hill Review writes that "BlazeVOX poetry collections tend to have three things in common: physically, they tend to be oversized and very attractive; stylistically, they tend to be experimental; and quality-wise, they tend to be strong." This reading will feature a variety of voices published by or forthcoming from this press. 

A reading featuring past and upcoming contributors, alongside editors, celebrating the release of the latest issue of Annulet and its first two years of publication. Participants from across the journal's five issues will read from their own work, each of which inquires into the porous infrastructures of rural life and experience, from the peripheral to the speculative, in poems that think with hobo markers, transit and poverty, hopping trains, desertifications, austerity's dilapidations, hidden extraction economies, water scarcities, and absurd transpositions of such structures into space. Readers and editors will also discuss, inviting audience contribution, Annulet's future as ongoing intervention and bright light in critical and rigorous inquiries, rooted into leftist and ecopoetic orientations, into poetics both of prose and poetry, literary criticism, and essay forms that are scholarly at heart and approachable in practice.

https://youtu.be/gFM-8QrizYs

Readings from Borderlands Poets about the past and the present of U.S Mexico border.

Four Mississippi poets, Ellie Black, Melissa Ginsburg, Maggie Graber, and C.T. Salazar, will read from recent work. These writers navigate issues of queerness, gender, power, and the divine. Because where we’re from shapes how we speak, there’s an interdependent relationship between voice and landscape. These works dwell in landscapes natural and technological, shaped by history, myth, ecology, and pop culture. They are interested in psychology, violence, and trauma, operating at the intersection of the monstrous and the human. Enlivened by lush imagery, sonic play, humor, and formal innovation, these poems present angels and video game glitches, dead gods and endangered wild spaces, as sites of possibility, longing, and transformation.

https://youtu.be/S2hc5QG9kOQ

Some poems are rowdy, trouble-making, rabble-rousing, and rebellious—full of insurrection, revolution, and mutiny—and some poems aim to take that charge a step further. Poems that want to strip the paint off the wall and then take the wall down with a wrecking ball and pummel the plaster to dust. Poems that make you wince with absolute delight. James Kimbrell, Stefene Russell, Kerry James Evans and Travis Mossotti will share the stage to read some of their most subversive and delightful poems from recent and forthcoming collections, followed by a Q&A session.

https://youtu.be/pv80UEfmXUk

How can you really judge a literary journal's aesthetic? In addition to reading the published work in the magazine, read or listen to the editors' own work. This rare opportunity sees all five editors of SWWIM Every Day--the only daily online literary magazine that publishes and raises female voices--read and discuss their award-winning poems. These five female editors' books and poems have won the National Poetry Series, St. Lawrence Book Award, The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Florida, The Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, the CIPA EVVY Gold Medal, Split Rock Review Chapbook Prize, Portlandia Chapbook Award, Best New Poets, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, and the Coniston Poetry Prize, among others.

Collectively, their poems, stories, creative non-fiction, craft essays, interviews, translations, and articles on the literary scene have appeared in The American Poetry Review, TheAtlantic.com, The Best American Poetry, cream city review, Creative Nonfiction, EcoTheo Review, Green Mountains Review Online, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review Poem of the Day, Narrative, Nimrod International Journal, Notre Dame Review, Pleaides, Poets & Writers, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, Split This Rock, Terrain.org, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. They've received residencies, grants, and fellowships from Artists in Residence in the Everglades, The Betsy Hotel-South Beach, CantoMundo, The Deering Estate, Letras Latinas / PINTURA PALABRA DC Ekphrastic, Maryland Transit Administration, O, Miami, Vermont Studio Center, and others.

In addition to running the SWWIM reading and residency series and operating SWWIM Every Day, they work as educators, journalists, publishers, copywriters, anthologists, advocates and administrators of the arts, and more.

A reading from the writings of  the 16 People Program Poets included in the book Fertile Repository: People Program Poets of New Orleans, 2022, and of their more recent poems.

Join Antonio Addessi(Sleeptalking, 2022) and Daniel W. K. Lee(Anatomy of Want, 2019) in a reading to celebrate this years newest additions to Rebel Satori Press—Octavio Gonzalez and Scott Hightower. The reading is a celebration of Octavio's debut full length volume of poetry Limerance and Scott's first book published under Rebel Satori Imperative to Spare. Rebel Satori Press is an independent small press based in New Orleans that has been publishing LGBTQ Poetry and the Occult for over twenty years.