Watershed Reading Series

media release: Join us on Saturday, February 17, 2024 at 7:00 PM for our February Watershed Reading featuring Erika Meitner, Maya Pindyck, and Taymour Soomro. Meitner will be reading poetry. Pindyck will be reading from Impossible Belonging (2023), her third and most recent collection of poems. The book explores the ways we belong (and fail to belong) to our histories, our cultures, our bodies, our communities, and to each other. Many of the poems engage questions that live at the intersections of Jewishness, whiteness, intergenerational trauma, and motherhood. Soomro will be reading prose.

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and the Library of Virginia Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award in poetry. Her poems have been published most recently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. She has received fellowships from the US-UK Fulbright Commission, MacDowell, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Mandel Cultural Leadership Foundation. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Maya Pindyck's third book of poems, Impossible Belonging (Anhinga Press, 2023), won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She is co-author of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Bennington Review, Pleiades, and Granta Magazine (Hebrew edition), and her visual, collaborative, and community-based work has been exhibited in New York City at the Art in Odd Places Public Festival, the Governors Island Art Fair, the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum, The Clemente, and Printed Matter. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.

Taymour Soomro is a British Pakistani writer. He read law at Cambridge University and Stanford Law School and has an MA and a PhD in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times. He is the author of Other Names for Love, shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize and a Malala Book Club pick. He has published a textbook on law with Oxford University Press and is the co-editor, with Deepa Anappara, of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Color. He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars.