[New York, NY]

Lisa Robertson, Rachel Levitsky, Anna Gurton-Wachter read at The Dance
January 25, 2020, 7:30 pm
at The Dance

Coach House Books and Ugly Duckling Presse present an evening of poetry readings with Lisa Robertson, Rachel Levitsky, and Anna Gurton-Wachter.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet and essayist currently living in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a longtime resident of Vancouver, where in the early 90s she began writing, publishing and collaborating in a community of artists and poets that included Artspeak Gallery and The Kootenay School of Writing. She has continued these activities for 30 years, publishing books, leaflets and posters, translating poetry and linguistics from French, lecturing and teaching internationally, and continuing her ongoing study into the political constitution of lyric voice. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018, the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in NY awarded her the inaugural CD Wright Award in Poetry. She has taught at Cambridge University, Princeton, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart Institute, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and American University of Paris, as well as holding research and residency positions at institutions across Canada, the US, and Europe.

Rachel Levitsky came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. In between those two events, she wrote fact sheets and polemic for street actions demonstrating for LGBT and Women’s Liberation, Women’s Health, and against the state negligence of the AIDS epidemic. Since becoming a poet, she’s published three book length collections, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) and the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013). Levitsky is the author of nine chapbooks, most recently, Hopefully, The Island, part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist Susan Bee. One of her current writing projects, titled “Existing Condition,” is a ‘memoir without memory’ indirectly addressing the ruptures of refugeeism as second generation post-Holocaust Jew. Adjunct and intersecting with her writing practice, Levitsky builds and participates in a variety of publishing, collaboration and pedagogical/performative activities. In 1999, she founded Belladonna* which is now Belladonna* Collaborative, a matrix of literary action promoting the writers and writing of the contemporary feminist avant-garde. She’s written and performed in a number of poetry plays. In 2014, she performed the role of Andy Warhol in Maxe Crandal’s Together Men Make Paradigms. In 2010, she co-founded the Office of Recuperative Strategies, an operation that staged workshops, walks, instant performances and instant publications during happenings in a variety of urban sites, including Alexanderplatz and the Gowanus Canal. In 2017, she was a fellow of LMCC Process Spaces, an open studio project on Governors Island and in 2009 she was Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. She is a Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute, and teaches irregularly at Naropa Summer Writing Program, The Poetry Project, Poets House and other situations as they arise.

Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (UDP) is her first full-length collection and her chapbooks include Mother of All (Above/Ground Press), The Abundance Chamber Works Alone (Essay Press), Blank Blank Blues (Horse Less Press), and CYRUS (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). Other work has appeared in PELT’s Feminist Temporalities, No Dear, 6×6, Elderly and elsewhere. Anna edits and makes books with DoubleCross Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, a few blocks from the building in which she was born.

Facebook event here.