Poetry in the Library featuring Pamenar Press: Voices of Change - A Feminist Collective Book Launch

Join us for an international special of our regular Poetry in the Library evening which will include readings from critically acclaimed poets and translators who will be launching their new books (find out more below). There will be a Q&A to follow and books to buy and borrow. Please register for your free place. Featured poets will be Leslie Kaplan, Rachel Levitsky, Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi, and Carolina Gómez-Montoya. Translators will be Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. Featured books will be The Book of Skies, Daffod*ls, Against Travel/Anti-Voyage, all published by Pamenar Press. Bios: LESLIE KAPLAN was born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised and educated in France. She has published more than twenty works (novels, essays, theatre and political fables) with the publisher P.O.L. and with Folio (Gallimard). She has written numerous columns for the French newspaper Libération, and contributes blogs to the online French news organ MédiaPart. Her 1982 L'Excès-l'usine (Hachette) and her 1983 Le Livre des ciels (P.O.L.) are in part the product of her politically motivated decision to work in factories beginning in January 1968 as part of the movement of “établis.” Kaplan received the Prix Wepler in 2012 for Millefeuille and the Grand Prix de la SGDL 2017 for her collected work. RACHEL LEVITSKY came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. She is the author Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013) and numerous chapbooks, recently, Hopefully, The Island, part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist Susan Bee. Levitsky builds and participates in a variety of publishing, collaboration and pedagogical/performative activities, such “Geometries of Recognition” a movement poetry workshop turned super8 film by the poet/filmmaker Stephanie Gray. In 1999 she founded Belladonna* which is now Belladonna* Collaborative. In 2017, she was a resident of LMCC’s Process Space on Governor’s Island where she worked on a project called “Mother of Separation, a study of language usage and migrant experience in NYC. She is Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute, Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and occasionally at lay poetry institutions like Poets House and The Poetry Project in NYC. Her most recent book is the bi-lingual Against Travel/Anti-Voyage with Pascal Poyet, published by Pamenar Press, 2020. KHASHAYAR ”KESS” MOHAMMADI is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks, three translated poetry chapbooks, and two full-length collections of poetry. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript G came out with Palimpsest Press in fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems Daffod*ls is out with Pamenar Press (2023). CAROLINA GOMEZ-MONTOYA is a writer, translator and professor living between Spanish, English and French. They hold a PhD in Latin American and Peninsular Literature and they are a faculty member of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College and at the Young Writer’s Workshop at Simon’s Rock. Carolina’s writing appears in Literal: Latin American Voices/Voces Latinoamericanas; ¡Basta! Mujeres colombianas contra la violencia de género; and the Oregon Humanities magazine. In 2020, they co-founded Crear Colectivo, in hopes of using language as a tool to promote solidarity, empathy, equity and the full participation of communities that have traditionally been excluded by institutions. They are currently based in Paris where they are engaged in a writing program at the Université de Paris 8 and working on a creative project devoted to the question of language and recognition. JENNIFER PAP teaches French and Francophone Studies at the University of Denver. She has written articles on 20th century and contemporary French writers and artists among which are Guillaume Apollinaire, Dominique Fourcade, Georges Braque, René Char, and Leslie Kaplan. AK Press published her translation of Leslie Kaplan's Disorder: A Fable in 2020; her translation of Kaplan's Miss Nobody Knows is to be published by Tripwire. Together with collaborator Julie Carr, as well as The Book of Skies with Pamenar Press, they have also translated Kaplan's 1982 work Excess-The Factory (Commune Editions, May 1, 2018). JULIE CARR is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including Real Life: An Installation (Omindawn 2018), Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta, 2017), and Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of the critical study of Victorian poetry, Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2014). With Jeffrey Robinson, she is the coeditor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory was published by Commune Editions in 2018.