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).

Please join The Berlin Writers’ Workshop for the prelaunch party for Organs of Little Importance, by BWW instructor Adrienne Chung.

“Organs of Little Importance is a riotous feat…Ferocious. Funny. Deeply intelligent. Adrienne Chung leaves a charred wake.” —Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs and Look

Taking its title from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Adrienne Chung’s debut collection asks why we cling so dearly to the vestigial parts of our psychologies—residues of first impressions, thought spirals to nowhere, memories that persist despite outliving their usefulness. The speaker in these poems tries to wear more color, indulges in Y2K nostalgia and falls in and out of love; a Jungian psychoanalyst has a field day with her dreams. 

While Darwin was perplexed and ultimately dismissive of these seemingly useless body parts, Organs of Little Importance reframes and repositions the apparent uselessness of our compulsions, superstitions, errant thoughts, and other selves. In diptychs and ghazals, sonnets and lullabies, Chung collects and preserves pieces of psychological debris as one would care for precious heirlooms, revealing their surprising potential to become sites of meaning and connection.

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.