Joshua Gottlieb-Miller: DYBBUK AMERICANA with Edgar Kunz and Lauren Russell

Presenting a poetry reading in celebration of Joshua Gottlieb-Miller's gorgeous, riveting new collection DYBBUK AMERICANA! Baltimore-based poets Edgar Kunz and Lauren Russell will read alongside Gottlieb-Miller to spotlight this exciting new book, which makes a hybrid text out of art, mysticism, and history, and takes the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor.
A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another's body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child.

Purchase DYBBUK AMERICANA Here!

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the author of Dybbuk Americana (Dybbuk Americana – Wesleyan University Press (weslpress.org), 2024) and The Art of Bagging (The Art of Bagging — Conduit, 2023). His poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing has also been published in Brooklyn Rail, Image, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, among other venues. Previously he served as Digital Nonfiction Editor and Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast. He has been awarded support from the University of Houston, Yiddish Book Center, MacDowell Colony, Yetzirah, and elsewhere.

Edgar Kunz is the author of two books: Fixer (Ecco, 2023), a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019). He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, American Poetry Review, and Poetry. He lives in Baltimore where he teaches at Goucher College and in the Newport MFA.

Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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