‘They were inhabiting a city radiating with multiple and multilexical and multistratigraphic nostalgias’, the poet Donna Stonecipher writes. This literary reading externalizes these multiplicities and features poets whose forms range from the acutely lyrical to the annotational. Spanning three languages, the disparate syntactic proclivities and thematic preoccupations of these writers unambiguously constellate around matters of place. The poems to be showcased in this event, when read collectively, conjure up a variety of affective states that inform the poetic subject’s entanglement with milieu—private or urban or macrocosmic or speculative—and their articulations of embeddedness, relocation, and dislocation. Joining Stonecipher are Johannes Heldén and Jaya Jacobo: the three will offer succinct reflections about how their respective notions of space and habitation are crystallized in their literary production, and they will read a selection of their poetry.

Johannes Heldén is a writer, visual artist, and musician. His interdisciplinary works deals with poetry, ecology, algorithms, sentience, and narrative structures. Recent projects include Astroecology which was published simultaneously in three languages, made into an interdisciplinary performance at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and a digital artwork published by Bonniers Konsthall. He has published seventeen books, four music albums, and seven digital online works of poetry and visual art.

Jaya Jacobo is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at Coventry University, where she currently does work on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, academics and community workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as with trans, queer and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and its diaspora. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing. Jaya has also just released Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House.

Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Tehran. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia (2023), which was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, and Transaction Histories (2018), which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books. She lives in Berlin.