F136.
Archives into Art: Jewish Writers Explode the Document
Friday, February 9, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am
What is this urge that drives us toward oral history, archives, and documents—to turn them into something else we’ve shaped and spun? What are our ethics and motivations? We will read and discuss our documentary poems, plays, librettos, and essays. As descendants of people who fled persecution, we take particular interest in historical record; as a people others attempt(ed) to erase, we explore the impetus to document and save. But, to quote a venerable rabbi: "If I am only for myself, who am I?"
Participants
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller has been a MacDowell fellow, a Tent Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and a Yetzirah scholar. His poetry collection, The Art of Bagging, won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. His second book, Dybbuk Americana, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.
S.L. (Sandi) Wisenberg is the author of The Wandering Womb, winner of the 2022 Juniper Prize in nonfiction. Her other books are Holocaust Girls, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, and The Sweetheart Is In. She is the editor of Another Chicago Magazine and is a writing coach.
Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and the author of several poetry collections, most recently The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and Fountain and Furnace. She is also coauthor of Writing Poems. Bar-Nadav is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Leah Lax is an author and librettist. Her latest book, Not From Here: Song of America (Pegasus/international), charts how she found her way back into American society by listening to immigrants and refugees tell her their journeys—a book about making art and (re)discovering the world.
Tom Haviv is a Brooklyn-based, Israeli-born writer, multimedia artist, and organizer. His debut book of poetry A Flag of No Nation was by Jewish Currents Press in 2019. He is the founder of the Hamsa Flag Project, which intends to stimulate conversation about the future of Israel/Palestine.
