Advanced RSVP is required. Click here to register for the event.
In the face of structural violence, our bodies offer the radical resistance of imperative vulnerability. What can we learn about strength from positions of care, abjection and disability? How can we find home in bodies, even while we know they need defending? Join us on May 14 at 4pm for a reading and conversation with Maya Pindyck, Mónica Gomery, and Leora Fridman about belonging, embodiment and the complexities of finding home—in ourselves, in relationship, and in place. The three writers will share from recent books of poetry and prose, followed by a conversation with one another and the audience.
About the Speakers:
Maya Pindyck is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator whose work explores relationships between memory, cultural belonging, and the capacities of language as social antidote. Her third poetry collection, Impossible Belonging, won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2023. She is also author of Emoticoncert (Four Way Books, 2016), Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, 2009), winner of the Many Voices Project Award, and coauthor of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers (Bloomsbury, 2022). She earned her PhD in English education from Columbia University's Teachers College and her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design. She grew up in Boston and Tel Aviv.
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi. Her most recent collection, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022. She is also the author of the poetry collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, and Poetry Northwest. Gomery was raised in Boston and Caracas by her Venezuelan Jewish family, and lives on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. She was ordained at the rabbinical school of Hebrew College in 2017, and serves currently on the clergy team at Kol Tzedek Synagogue.
Leora Fridman is a writer whose work is concerned with issues of identity, care, ability, and embodiment. She's author, most recently, of STATIC PALACE, a collection of essays about chronic illness, art and politics (punctum books 2022) in addition to other books of prose, poetry and translation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Millions, the New York Times, the Rumpus, Tricycle Magazine, Open Space, Matters of Feminist Practice and the Believer, among others. She has taught online and in person in universities, homes and retreat centers, and collaborates widely with artists, writers and community groups. She is a recipient of support, grants and residencies from organizations including Fulbright, Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation, Caldera, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently Curator in Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and Faculty Associate in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. More at leorafridman.com.