Featuring writers Rebecca Faulkner, Hanna Griff-Sleven, and Amy Stein-Milford. Listen to readings from and discussions regarding their most recent works, which focus on themes that resonate with memory, history, sanctuary, and place. About the Speakers In her debut collection of poetry, Permit Me to Write My Own Ending (2023), Rebecca Faulkner spans generations and timescapes – from gritty, defiant explorations of a London adolescence, to haunting poems detailing love and adulthood in the United States. Faulkner’s language and form dissects the emotional impact of historical trauma, navigating and sharply reframing nationality and memory, interiority, and history. Depictions of London during the Blitz and post-war Berlin sit alongside poems about motherhood and childhood. In this defiant debut collection, the act of writing boldly confronts a landscape dominated by patriarchal notions of the female, deftly redefining it with language and vivid imagery. In her autoethnographic memoir, Hanna Me/Hana Mi: Sketches of My Life in Japan, Hanna Griff-Sleven documents her three years of living in Okayama, Japan in the mid 1990s. While writing about her encounters in Japan, she reflects on what her experiences as a gaijin (outsider) taught her about herself and her new countrymen. In addition to her lyrical prose, Griff-Sleven collaborated with artist Ayla Erdener who rendered stunning watercolors that not only illustrate each story but allow the reader to see into the text. In her memoir, Stories of Tormented Men, Amy Stein-Milford, excavates discarded family documents and stories as a way of holding onto her father as he is fading from Alzheimer’s. But as she digs into her Orthodox Jewish roots, memories of her own intellectual and sexual explorations surface, and she discovers the story she is writing is not the one she had intended to tell. In haunting and humorous prose, Stein-Milford writes of the relics that we collect, the legacies we leave behind, and the new growth that comes out of loss.
New York City, NY; NYC