T177.
Re-Presenting the Past: Poets Writing the Holocaust Toward a Humane Future
Thursday, March 24, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
What can writing poetry about the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust do to address white supremacy? How can Jewish poets—specifically mothers—rewrite a narrative of exceptionalism for future generations while staying true to the particularities of Holocaust trauma? This panel takes up these questions through the voices of five poets, all mothers, whose writing explores intersections of Jewish trauma, inheritance, motherhood, and poetry’s capacities for antiracist work.
Participants
Maya Pindyck is the author of the poetry collections Emoticoncert and Friend Among Stones. A 2019 NEA Fellow in creative writing, she teaches and directs the writing program at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is a poet and author of The Many Names for Mother (Wick Poetry Prize, KSU Press, 2019), Don't Touch the Bones, and 40 Weeks. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College in Arkansas.
Elana Bell is the author of Mother Country, poems about motherhood, fertility, and mental illness. Her first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award. She teaches poetry to actors at the Juilliard School. www.elanabell.com.
Luisa Muradyan is the author of American Radiance. She earned her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where she was the editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She was also the recipient of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize.
Alicia Ostriker 's most recent collections of poetry are Waiting for the Light, which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems. She is an Academy of American Poets Chancellor Emerita, and New York state poet.
