Poet Kathy Engel

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The day of the event, you will receive an email with a Zoom link by 5 pm. If you have signed up for a reading on a Saturday, your Zoom link will arrive on Friday afternoon.

Join Kathy Engel reading from her latest collection of poems, The Lost Brother Alphabet (Get Fresh Books, 2020), called by Aracelis Girmay “a deeply elegiac and formally inventive work that I will return to for how it carries, among other things, the tenacity to love another, again, again, through the years and even in deaths, of body or version or story.”

New York Poet Laureate Alicia Ostriker writes, “The Lost Brother Alphabet breaks my heart and delights my spirit at the same time. As Engel’s love of language rises to the occasion of unquenched love for a “handsome, flirting…insatiable…gone” brother, dead by his own hand, memory and mystery, grief and wordplay coexist in this extraordinary suite of poems, disciplined and delicate, vibrant with life even as they mourn their loss. You will never read another book like this one.” 

Over the past 40 years, poet, essayist, and educator Kathy Engel has worked in many of the major social justice, peace, and human rights movements in the United States. She has co-founded numerous organizations, including MADRE (1983), an international women’s human rights group, which she directed for five years.

Her books include Ruth’s Skirts (IKON, 2007); The Kitchen, in collaboration with artist German Perez (Yaboa Press, 2011); and We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (Interlink Books, 2007), co-edited with Kamal Boullata. The video work Whowillkneel4you? (2018) appears on The Root, and features a chorus of artists reading Engel’s poem, “To Kneel.”

Engel  serves as Chair and Associate Arts Professor in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Art and Public Policy, and Master’s Program in Arts Politics.  She currently is working on a memoir, Marvelous Dissonance, about her cultural work, activism, life, and poetry. 

This event is free but registration is required.