Sweet Repetition: A Reading by Cynthia Cruz

Tulsa Artist Fellowship hosts a reading and conversation with Cynthia Cruz, one of the most important poets working today. She is the author of some dozen books, including eight collections of poetry, and has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her latest collection, , is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Informed by psychoanalytic theory yet intensely lyrical, this collection "considers how repetition holds both the power to constrain and to generate." Is repetition a trap? A move forward? Both? These questions are relevant not only to artists of every kind, but to all of us looking for ways to move forward when our feet seem to be mired in the past. Presented by Tulsa Artist Fellowship 2024-2026 Awardee, Boris Dralyuk.

Thursday, November 20

6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

Doors Open: 5:30 PM

Tulsa Artist Fellowship Project Space

205 E Archer Street, Tulsa, OK 74103

Free Event

ABOUT SWEET REPETITION:

Integrating Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and the works of other poets, this collection explores narrative through abstraction and considers how repetition holds both the power to constrain and to generate. Freud explains how what we repress—what we know but don’t want to acknowledge—reappears in our actions through repetition. Through slips of the tongue or selective memory, we engage with what our unconscious knows, finding knowledge through unknowing. The psychoanalytic session is centered on bringing forth repressed knowledge through acts of unknowing—speaking without thinking—which brings one closer to recognizing an obscured desire. The poetry of Sweet Repetition works in ways akin to the psychoanalytic act. These pulsing poems follow the definitions of the word revolution—to revolve, change direction, unroll, unwind, happen again, repeat, orbit around. Images and words reappear in the motion of Cynthia Cruz’s poems, inviting us into their revolutionary, political, and cumulative effects.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

is a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer whose work examines art, class, and silence. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her debut novel, Steady Diet of Nothing, appeared in 2023, and her most recent nonfiction work is The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (Repeater Books, 2021). She is also the author of Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019) and editor of Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, and other leading journals. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and Princeton University’s Hodder program. Cruz has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence, UMass Amherst, and Columbia University, and currently lives in Berlin, Germany. Her next collection, Sweet Repetition, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

ABOUT THE HOST

is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) and Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934 (Brill, 2012). He has edited 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and translated works by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Guardian, and Granta. Dralyuk’s honors include first prize in the Compass Translation Award (2011), the Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize (2012), the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing (2020), the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for his translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees (2022), and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024). He is also a 2024–2026 Tulsa Artist Fellow. Formerly editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is now editor-in-chief of Nimrod International Journal and teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa.

ABOUT TULSA ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

Established in 2015, Tulsa Artist Fellowship was created as a place-based initiative by the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) that addresses pressing challenges faced by contemporary artists and arts workers living in and joining Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa Artist Fellowship believes the arts are critical to advancing cultural citizenship and supports community-invested practitioners who intentionally engage with our city.

Our exhibitions and events are free, documented, and archived.

VISITOR EXPERIENCE

Project Space accommodates wheelchairs and strollers. Variable seating is provided in addition to areas for distanced standing. Family-scale private washrooms are available to support visitors with disabilities and caregivers who need access to increased square footage. Street-side parking is available using the Park Mobile App and is free after 5 pm and all day Saturday-Sunday.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Tulsa Artist Fellowship