Emily Abendroth and Irit Reinheimer in conversation with Syd Zolf

Join us in welcoming authors Emily Abendroth and Irit Reinheimer, who will read from their books Sousveillance Pageant (Radiator Press, 2021) and Push the Water (Thread Makes Blanket Press, 2023) and will be joined in conversation with poet and scholar Syd Zolf.

Push the Water weaves together descriptions of archival footage, home movies and memories that prompt new recognitions of Irit’s Jewish family’s participation in settler-colonialism and the occupation of Palestine. Emily’s Sousveillance Pageant combines fiction, poetry, and essayistic forms to ask; what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we as humans cannot live without, and what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we cannot possibly live with (or which make life unsurvivable)?

About the Authors:

Irit Reinheimer is an artist and writer based in Philadelphia. Her writing is influenced by her background in experimental filmmaking, where she has taken a sculptural approach to examining themes of loss and inheritance through shorts films constructed from her late father’s 8mm home movies, archival materials, and new footage. Irit’s films, Young, Jewish and Left, How the Bridge Works, I Told Her This Was Home, and Of Origin, have screened nationally and internationally. Push the Water is her first book and one of several pieces she worked on as a student at the Image Text MFA program at Ithaca College. Beyond her artistic practices, Irit has worked for over a decade in communications for community-based projects and organizations focused on social change. She is also a long-time member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Irit’s Website

Emily Abendroth (she/they) is a poet, activist, water-lover, bicycle enthusiast, and holder of many rotating curiosities living in Philadelphia, PA. She is the author of the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. She has also released chapbooks with Albion Press, Belladonna, Horseless Press, Little Red Leaves, and Zumbar. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was named a 2013 Pew Fellow in Poetry. She is a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, as well as LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty. They are currently the Program Manager for Philly Climate Works.

Emily’s Website

Syd Zolf’s interdisciplinary practice explores questions about history, knowledge, subjectivity, responsibility, and the limits of language, meaning, and the human. Zolf’s work queerly enacts how ethics founders on the shoals of the political, imagining other possibilities of sociality, space, and time. Zolf’s No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics was released by Duke University Press in 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, presented by the Poetry Foundation. They have published six books of poetry and six chapbooks. Zolf’s poetry and essays have been widely published in journals and anthologies worldwide and translated into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Awards include a 2018 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Art videos Zolf has written and/or directed have screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, White Cube Bermondsey, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. They hold an MFA from The New School and a PhD in Philosophy, Art and Social Thought from the European Graduate School. Zolf teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and spent many years organizing writing projects with trans youth, incarcerated people, and other communities.

Syd’s Website

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