With a mission to publish strange poetry in translation and in English that would be unpublishable by other means, co•im•press is an award winning, nonprofit small literary publisher that started producing books in 2013.
Fence Books, born in 2001, after Fence was founded by Rebecca Wolff in 1998, celebrates its 25th Anniversary in 2026.
With these contemporary poets' array of approaches, this reading is a visitation of memory amongst the surreal and near. In honor of T.S. Eliot's famous opening lines of The Waste Land, each poet will read poems exploring the complexities of consciousness in being.
Established in 2023, Working Girls Press uplifts and publishes art and writing by sex workers, a community historically underrepresented and misrepresented in the traditional publishing landscape. This reading from contributors will feature selections from recent and upcoming releases, including The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine as well as I Hate My Job: Thots on Sex Work, Labor, and Capitalism.
This reading continues a series that began more than two years ago, as poets from the United States visited Mexico City and read with Mexican writers at the small poetry-only community-run bookstore Librería Escandalar, a place where poets from different countries meet, hold readings, and exchange or leave books. These readings allowed us to get to know each other’s work, and to keep in touch since. Juan Malasuerte and Escandalar are two imprints associated with the bookstore, and a bilingual anthology of Latin American and U.S.
In this session, four poets for whom a writing language isn't a native language, but a second, third, or fourth language, will read from their most recent manuscripts-in-progress. These poems, though primarily in English, work with other languages through multilingual poetics and self-translation. For three poets in this reading, the self is brought into English by way of German, Spanish, and Persian, but for one poet, Creole comes into focus, so as to assert itself over the native tongue.
Four poets, all featured in the anthology The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Press, 2021), will read their work and discuss how their poetics intersect African diasporic traditions, the Black speculative, and formal experimentation.
This reading features an extensive list of some of our most recognized translator-poets reading poetry in English translation from shithole countries—those named and unnamed. It serves as a way to resist the imperialist, racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies which divide us and to recognize how English language poetry in translation plays a prominent role in making works of poetry available and creates international networks for political and social solidarity and change. A partial list of readers is included below.
We are interdisciplinary poets and poet-artists interested in resistance as well as the generative impossibility of resistance. Our work engages the negative capability of non-dominant forms of life to create the thinking space and creative gesture of emergent anti-fascism, particularly through queer feminist archives. We are interested in the unformed or dissembled ground that is potent and generative of new ways of perceiving, articulating and being.