Jewish writers will convene in Milwaukee for a weekend of conversation and readings held at The Bindery. Originally planned for September 2020, this mini-symposium is long anticipated. Moderated and curated by Lewis Freedman, two unique panel conversations on aspects of Jewish writing will take place during the day on Saturday and will be bookended by readings on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Lisa Fishman's most recent book of poetry is Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020). Six earlier collections include 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015), F L O W E R  C A R T (Ahsahta, 2011) and The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2009). She has stories in recent or forthcoming issues of Granta, The Rupture, Guesthouse and elsewhere. Next fall, her first collection of stories, World Naked Bike Ride, will be out on Gaspereau Press. She lives in Orfordville and Madison, Wisconsin.

Lewis Freedman is the author of Residual Synonyms for the Name of God and I Want Something Other Than Time (both from Ugly Duckling Presse) as well as many chapbooks of poetry, including Am Perhaps Yet (Oxeye). In addition, he has authored several experiments on the form of the book including Solitude: The Complete Games (Troll Thread), a collaboration with Kevin Rydberg that will take several years for your computer to read, and the book within a book, Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well-Greased Press) which interleaves notebook facsimiles with poems on the practice of notebooking. He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oklahoma State University, and served as Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College.

Adeena Karasick, PhD, is a NY-based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist, and media artist, and the author of twelve books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), and noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein). Recent publications include Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her spoken word opera. Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute, and is poetry editor for Explorations in Media Ecology. She is a 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. The Adeena Karasick archive is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Natalie Lyalin is the author of two books, Blood Makes Me Faint, but I Go for It (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014) and Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books, 2009), and the chapbooks Try A Little Time Travel (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and Short Cloud (above / ground press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Fanzine, Divine Magnet, Verse Magazine, Sixth Finch, The Tiny, and Conduit. She was the co-editor and co-founder of Glitterpony Magazine and Natural History Press. She lives in Rhode Island.

Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and lives mainly in Berlin. His most recent full book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, published by NYRB Poets, discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, it won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster. It was also the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the 2019 Venice Biennale. His previous book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages. As a translator and scholar, he works primarily with Russian avant-garde and experimental poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ariel Resnikoff's most recent works include the poetry collection Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020), and with Jerome Rothenberg, the translingual epistolary collaboration A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021). He is an editor at Jacket2 and a co-founding editor of the Materialist Press. Ariel has taught courses on translingual writing and multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (University of Pennsylvania) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical English translation of Mikhl Likht’s Yiddish modernist long poem Processions; and with Riv Weinstock and Lilach Lachman, he is translating into English Avot Yeshurun’s selected Hebrew writings. In 2019, Ariel received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is currently a Fulbright Postdoctoral US Scholar.

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman is a fourth-generation Ashkenazi settler from places in the traditional territory of the Lenape diaspora, with ancestral ties to eradicated Jewish communities in Warsaw, Jaroslaw, and Rzeszów (PL), Chișinău (MLD), Dnipro (UKR), and Seirijai (LITH). As an interdisciplinary artist, curator, poet, and organizer, he constructs art interventions, plays, films, installations, exhibitions, social and public projects, and texts, often in collaboration with other artists and specific communities. His contributions establish difficult situations for durational contemplation and vernacular rites, manifesting a quiet language of intense proximity over time by radicalizing accidents, anxieties, and memory. Recent works include the performance archive Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee (2018) and the film Night Herons (2021), among others. He is an editor at the Jewish art and politics journal PROTOCOLS and a PhD candidate at the School for the Contemporary Arts of Simon Fraser University where he is writing his dissertation, Walking in Ethnocidal Places; Situation, Dispossession, and Translocal Struggle for Time.

Marina Temkina was born in Leningrad and received her MA in History. She emigrated from the former Soviet Union in 1978 and settled in New York a year after. In the US, Temkina worked as a translator in refugee resettlement agencies, interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation, and co-organized the oral history Archive for Jewish Immigrant Culture. Currently, she works as a psychotherapist. Temkina’s poetry books were published in Russian by Syntax in Paris, France (1985, 1989), by Slovo/Word in New York (1995), and by NLO in Moscow, Russia (2005, 2019). Her book in English from Ugly Duckling Presse, What Do You Want (2009), consists mostly of concrete poetry installations. Temkina won the public art project You Are My Solar Energy for the Second Street Station, Bergen-Hudson Light Rail in Hoboken, NJ (2004). She has published three artist books in collaboration with her partner, French artist Michel Gérard. Together they collaborate on international visual art exhibitions.

Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor whose publications include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists), Boris by the Sea (Octopus), Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook), and, most recently, the chapbooks From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia) and Dead Winter (Fonograf). In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse, where he produced a variety of books, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, co-edited 6x6 magazine, and curated the Eastern European Poets Series. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

A Jewish Literary Sabbath: A Mini-Symposium