Please join us to celebrate the Berlin launch of Tracy Fuad’s PORTAL (University of Chicago Press, 2024) with readings from Patty Nash, Lotta Thießen, and Zoe Darsee.

Praise for PORTAL:

From a dazzling array of poetic techniques, Fuad's use of repetition to fashion pitch-perfect lyrics stands out, from tiny syllabic songs—'the inking of a ginkgo leaf'—to complex, emotionally freighted refrains, 'my mother’s mother’s remains remain at the morgue.' . . . For Fuad, language is a stubborn, tangible thing that bruises the body and, as the speaker says, created a 'swollen spot on the roof of my mouth where it met my teeth.' . . . Fuad's captivating poetry is totally her own." ― Booklist starred review

The Berlin Writers' Workshop and the Schwules Museum present a reading and discussion with Sarah Schulman and her most recent book LET THE RECORD SHOW: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF ACT UP NEW YORK, 1987-1993: Twenty years in the making, LET THE RECORD SHOW is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism. Schulman will discuss the ACT UP movement, why it was so effective, and how the current Palestine Solidarity movement in the U.S. is working from its playbook. 

This event will be moderated by Ben Mauk.

RSVP for your free ticket here (sold out). Additional standing-room tickets will be available at the door, please arrive early to guarantee entry. This is a free event.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Northwestern University and is on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Ben Mauk is a writer based in Berlin. His essays and reporting appear in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. He is the founding director of the Berlin Writers' Workshop. 

The Berlin Writers' Workshop presents a reading with Chana Porter to celebrate the launch of THE THICK AND THE LEAN.

Lambda Award finalist Chana Porter's The Thick and the Lean is a startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind. Join us for a conversation ranging from Big Agriculture and land rights, pleasure as rebellion, and how imagined realities might help us see our own world more clearly.

Chana Porter is a novelist, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls and trans and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. Her debut novel The Seep was an ABA Indie Next Pick, Open Letters Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book of 2020, a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Times (UK) Best Sci-fi Book of 2021. Her latest novel The Thick and The Lean is out now from Saga/Simon&Schuster and Titan Books (UK).

Megan Fernandes and special guest Edgar Kunz join Tracy Fuad of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop to celebrate the launch of Fernandes’s second poetry collection I Do Everything I’m Told.

Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities.

Megan Fernandes is the author of Good Boys and a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Common, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. An associate professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College, Fernandes lives in New York City.

Edgar Kunz is the author of Fixer and Tap Out. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

Praise for I Do Everything I’m Told

Moving. . . .irresistible…. Transforms verse into multiverse.
—The New Yorker

Wrestling with issues of desire, sexuality, loss, and adventure to extremely compelling effect.
—Vogue

Captivating.
—New York Magazine

Free entry.

Location:
Lettretage Literaturhaus
Veteranenstraße 21
10119 Berlin

Date & Time: September 14, 20:00

The Berlin Writers’ Workshop is proud to present the launch and celebratory reading of The Loveliest Vowel Empties with ap Berlin. presents  The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French. Kathleen Heil will discuss her approach to translating the poems and read excerpts from the book, followed by a conversation with contemporary art critic and curator An Paenhuysen.

Meret Oppenheim was born in Berlin in 1913 and died in Basel in 1985. Best known for Object, her fur-lined teacup from 1936, her expansive body of work included painting, drawing, sculpture, object constructions, jewelry designs, and poetry.

Kathleen Heil is a writer/translator and choreographer/performer whose poetry, prose, and translations appear in The New Yorker, Fence, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Originally from New Orleans, she lives and works in Berlin. 

An Paenhuysen is an art critic, cultural historian, and curator of contemporary art in Berlin. She has written for Berlin Art Link, Contemporary &, and Spex, and co-curated exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien.

Oppenheim’s poetry—49 poems written between 1933 and 1980—moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, “express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.” 

A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that “the singularity of Meret Oppenheim’s work is such that nothing seems dated … the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.” The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Menil Collection, and the Kunstmuseum Bern.

The Berlin Writers’ Workshop and ap present a reading in celebration of new work by Ryan Ruby and Bennett Sims

Ryan Ruby is the author of the novel The Zero and the One and the poem Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the National Poetry Series. His reviews and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Nation, the New Left Review, the Believer, and elsewhere. He has taught fiction at the Berlin Writers' Workshop. He lives in Berlin.

Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape and the story collection White Dialogues. His new collection, Other Minds and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in November 2023. His work has received the Bard Fiction Prize, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Pushcart Prize. He has taught fiction at the Berlin Writers' Workshop and currently teaches at the University of Iowa.

The Berlin Writers’ Workshop and ap present a celebration of the German launch of What Are You with Lindsay Lerman in conversation with Ryan Ruby.

Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation in 50 acts. Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous ‘you,’ Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back.

Lindsay Lerman's first book, I'm From Nowhere, was published in 2019. Buzzfeed declared it a “heartbreaker of a debut” and Entropy listed it as a favorite book of 2019. Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, Hobart, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is working on a feature-length film adaptation of her short story “Real Love,” which first appeared in New York Tyrant magazine. She is also working on a philosophy manuscript about creation and capital in light of Georges Bataille's concept of nonknowledge. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and translates philosophical texts from French to English. She has taught workshops and seminars on writing in hybrid genres.

Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in Harpers, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, n+1, The Baffler, and elsewhere. His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books. It has subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers' Workshop and was a 2019 Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

The Berlin Writers’ Workshop and Hopscotch Reading Room present a reading to celebrate Osip Mandelstam’s The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems in new translations by Alistair Noon.

The Voronezh Workbooks: Osip Mandelstam spent three years in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, in south-western Russia, after someone in his circle of acquaintances had informed the Soviet authorities of his “Stalin Epigram” in 1934. The ninety-odd poems he wrote there are the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to Mandelstam’s consistent independence of mind and concern for the freedom of thought. More covertly and controversially, however, they also bear the marks of Mandelstam’s attempts to somehow reinstate himself back into Soviet society. In addition to all the poems that Russian editors have suggested constitute the sequence Mandelstam would have wished to see into print, this edition includes the main variants and exclusions preserved in manuscripts and in the memory of Mandelstam’s wife and executor, Nadezhda.

Occasional and Joke Poems: Parallel to his more famous poems about the buildings of St. Petersburg, the shores of the Black Sea, and the streets of Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote many brief, spontaneous poems about his friends, enemies and everyday occurrences over his entire writing life. Though his poetic, political and personal trajectory was to be a lonely one, he in fact had a convivial and gregarious personality, of which these poems are a product. This volume collects them in English for the first time, with an introduction and notes for context. It provides a fresh perspective on this poet whose sense of the past, the present and the future seems second to none.

Alistair Noon's publications include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both Nine Arches Press, and a dozen chapbooks, most recently Two Verse Essays (Longbarrow Press). His translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam have appeared in three volumes from Shearsman Books: Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems (2018), The Voronezh Workbooks, and Occasional and Joke Poems (both 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he's published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.

Poet and translator Justin Quinn was born in Dublin, Ireland and earned his BA and PhD from Trinity College. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The Ooaa Bird (1995), Privacy (1999), Fuselage (2002), Waves and Trees (2006), Close Quarters (2011), and Early House (2015). He also wrote the novel Mount Merrion (2013). Quinn moved to Prague in the late 1990s, and his poetry often shows the influence of Anglo, American, and Irish poetry traditions as well as his experiences in the Czech Republic and as a translator of Czech poetry. His translations of poet Petr Borkovec were collected in From the Interior (2008), and Quinn is currently translating the work of Bohuslav Reynek. Quinn’s own work was translated into Czech in the collection Vlny a stromy (2009, translated by Tomáš Fürstenzeller).
 
Quinn’s scholarly books include Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (2002); American Errancy: Empire, Sublimity & Modern Poetry (2005); and Between Two Fires: Transnationalism & Cold War Poetry (2015). With David Wheatley, Quinn founded the poetry magazine Metre. He is associate professor of American and English literature at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic

Photo credit: Karl Hurst