A Collective Reading & Discussion of SMALLTOWNNOVELLA at Wendy’s Subway

Join UDP for a collective reading of SMALLTOWNNOVELLA by Ronald M. Schernikau, translated by Lucy Jones. Published in West Germany in 1980, and appearing for the first time in English, the novella follows a teenaged working-class communist who falls in love with a popular jock.

In LARB, Ben Miller and Nicholas Courtman write that this “was the first of Schernikau’s many attempts to lay out a gay politics that would open him to the world rather than fating him to a specific lot within it: an identity politics not constructed to elaborate and defend a single perspective, but one that sought to locate the self within a broader movement to transform society.”

Eliot Duncan, Rainer Diana Hamilton, Louise Akers, Madison Newbound, and Koz will read sections of Schernikau’s experimental, stream-of-consciousness prose. Following the reading, Grace Nissan, Madeline Adams, and Milo Wippermann will facilitate a conversation about style, form, communist imaginations, the role of translation, and Schernikau’s significance in queer, leftist literature.

Grace Nissan is a poet and translator. Recent books include The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and translations of Bourgeois Coldness by Henrike Kohpeiß (Divided Publishing), kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books), and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of five books, including Lilacs (Krupskaya Books 2025) and a new book this spring, This Reasonable Habit, co-authored with Violet Spurlock (Spunk 2026). 

Madeline Adams is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago studying queer German history. Her dissertation examines queer East German media, activism, and archives before and after reunification. She has also worked in archives and collections at the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center and the Wende Museum in Los Angeles.

Vayne Ong is a historian and editor from the Jersey Shore. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at Columbia University, where she writes about family and 20th century New York City.

Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at NYU, where she co-organizes the Organism for Poetic Research. Akers is the author of the chapbook, Alien year (Oversound, 2020) and the full-length collection, Elizabeth/The story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022). Her  next book, I Will Dog You, is forthcoming from UDP. 

Koz is a psychologist and psychoanalyst forever in training who works in private practice and with Free Clinic NYC. They like to read.

Madison Newbound is a writer and server living in western MA. Her debut novel, Misrecognition, came out with Simon & Schuster in 2024. She’s currently at work on her second.

Milo Wippermann is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse. He is the author of Joan of Arkansas, which won a Whiting Award in poetry and drama and was a finalist for a Lambda Award. He holds an MFA from Brown University and lives in Lenapehoking, Brooklyn.