Stratis Haviaras Reading with Jos Charles and Jana Prikryl

Date: 

Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 6:00pm

Location: 

Thompson Room

Jos Charles and Jana Prikryl Portraits Jos Charles is author of a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah, and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is the founding-editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the US, and engages in direct gender justice work with a variety of organizations and performers. Charles's poetry has appeared in Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards are the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2015 Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship.
In an interview with LAMBDA, Charles was asked about the influence of Paul Celan on her work: “Celan writes a kind of hope that’s an antidote to what we are now saturated in: liberal, bad faith hope. It’s a poetry brimming with possibility—connections to one’s history, past, memory, but also what is to be done. His late poems especially are such precise, descriptive objects—and astoundingly, after 1945, after the death camps, and in German. His work is and has an afterlife—like turning, leaning in, and whispering a word as the world ends. His lines, for me, are very useful, and beautiful.”
She currently teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program. Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a PhD student at UC Irvine. She resides in Long Beach, CA.

 

Jana Prikryl was born in the Czech Republic and moved to Canada at the age of six. She is the author of three books of poems, Midwood, No Matter, and The After Party. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Prikryl lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor at The New York Review of Books