The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore welcome poets Janet R. Kirchheimer and Jaclyn Piudik for a virtual reading and discussion celebrating their new co-authored collection, Seduction: Out of Eden. With live music by poet/musician Raquel Solomon.
RSVP below to receive login information (our virtual events are held via Zoom). FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online from the publisher.
Jaclyn Piudik is the author of To Suture What Frays (Kelsay Books, 2017) and three chapbooks, the corpus undone in the blizzard (Espresso Chapbooks, 2019), Of Gazelles Unheard (Beautiful Outlaw, 2013), and The Tao of Loathliness (fooliar press, 2005/8). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Writing, Columbia Poetry Review, Burning House, and Barrow Street. She received a New York Times Fellowship for Creative Writing and the Alice M. Sellers Award from the Academy of American Poets. Jaclyn has edited many volumes of poetry, including collections for award-winning Canadian publisher Book*hug. In addition, she edits academic monographs for the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, as well as an M.A. and collaborative Ph.D. in Medieval Studies and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto. Jaclyn teaches creative and academic writing at the University of Toronto and has a private mentoring practice. Her website is jaclynpiudik.com.
Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us, poems about the Holocaust and her family (Clal, 2007). She is producing AFTER, a cinematic documentary in which poets perform and examine the role of art in responding to the Holocaust. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee with poems in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including Connecticut Review, Atlanta Review, Mudfish, Limestone, and The Poet’s Quest for God. Her chapter, “At the Water’s Edge: Poetry and the Holocaust,” appears in The Psychoanalytic Textbook of Holocaust Studies (Routledge, 2019). Janet received a Certificate of Appreciation from the 261st Signal Brigade for her poetry reading for a Multi-National Forces Days of Remembrance Holocaust Memorial Service, for which she also was given a Citation from The Council of The City of New York. Most recently, she appeared at a Six-Word Memoir storytelling event at the Tenement Museum in New York City. Janet received a Drisha Institute for Jewish Education Arts Fellowship, is a writing coach, and teaches creative writing and poetry. Her website is janetkworks.com.
Raquel Solomon is a poet, composer, and songwriter. She studied flamenco guitar in Granada and plays violin, as well. She incorporates themes of family, music, and Judaism in much of her writing. Her poetry has been published in Mudfish, Spilt Ink, The Columbia Journal of American Studies, Voices Israel, The Bronx Memoir Project, Tiferet, and other literary journals. Most recently her poem, “Alef Beys” was chosen for the The David Labkovski Project, an online exhibit of paintings about Vilna, Lithuania. She is currently recording a song she composed to her grandfather’s Yiddish poem with opera singer Cheryl Warfield, artistic director of More Opera in NYC, and her mother composed and will record the piano arrangement.
About the Book
Seduction: Out of Eden is a modern re-visioning of the creation story from the Book of Genesis. The poems are eclectic in style, and offer a lyrical interpretation of creation, the Garden of Eden, and the expulsion, drawing on the biblical text as well as exegetical, midrashic, and contemporary sources.
“Collaborations between great jazz musicians yield thrilling results, allowing us to hear music in new, original ways that open us to new places in ourselves. This is how Seduction: Out of Eden works. I don’t know of another collaboration in poetry where each poet is willing to subsume his or her own ego and voice into another’s so different from their own. The entwining creates a thrilling new persona. Each let go of their own voice to create something that will make us hear an old music new, the birth of an extraordinary voice intoxicated with language, a complex river of words, that while deadly serious, and barely pausing for breath, still gives us a little wink from the banks. Praise be!” –Mary Stewart Hammond, author of Out of Canaan and Entering History