Luz y Poesía: A Hanukkah Celebration

Join Jewtina y Co. for Luz y Poesía, a night of highlighting works from Latina-Jewish poets and kindling Hanukkah lights.

The evening will include readings from Might Kindred, a new collection of poems by Rabbi Mónica Gomery, and works from Aurora Levins Morales, Leora Fridman and Rosebud Ben-Oni who all explore themes of identity, belonging, spirituality, gender, justice and transformation through their writing.

About the Artists

Rosebud Ben-Oni: Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which received a Starred Review in Booklist and was a Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and the chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020) in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appears on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others. More at rosebudbenoni.com.

Leora Fridman: Leora Fridman is a writer whose work is concerned with issues of identity, assimilation, care, ability, and embodiment. She's author of My Fault, winner of the Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize and STATIC PALACE, a collection of essays on chronic illness, in addition to other books of prose, poetry and translation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Millions, the New York Times, the Rumpus, Tricycle Magazine, Open Space, Denver Quarterly, jubilat and the Believer, among others. She has taught online and in person in universities, homes and retreat centers, and collaborates widely with artists, writers and community groups. She is currently Curator in Residence at the Jewish Museum of Baltimore and Faculty Associate in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. More at leorafridman.com.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. Her second book, Might Kindred, won the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, judged by Kwame Dawes, Aimee Nezhukumatatil, and Hilda Raz. As a Jewish daughter of Venezuelan immigrants, her work explores queerness, diaspora, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is also the author of the poetry collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems appear, or are forthcoming, most recently in The Iowa Review, Adroit Journal, Black Warrior Review, Poet Lore, American Poets, and elsewhere. Mónica serves as Rabbi and Music Director at Kol Tzedek Synagogue, and teaches on the faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. More at monicagomerywriting.com.

Aurora Levins Morales: Aurora Levins Morales is an Ashkenazi Boricua essayist, poet and fiction writer who work has been widely anthologized and translated. She is the author of seven books, most recently Silt: Prose Poems (2019), Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (2019) and Kindling: Writings on the Body, with two more on the way. Her favorite genre is prose poetry/poetic prose, and her work bridges the most intimately personal and the global, body and planet, systemic cruelties writ large and small, transformation, recovery, imagination and hope. More at https://www.patreon.com/auroralevinsmorales.

About Might Kindred (Winner of the 2021 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

The poems of Might Kindred wonder aloud: Can we belong to one another, and “can a people belong to a dreaming machine?” Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Here anthems are sung and fall apart midsong. The speaker exchanges letters with her ancestors, is visited by a shadow sister, and interrogates what it means to make a home as a first-generation American. More at https://www.monicagomerywriting.com/might-kindred.

Order your copy through your local independent bookstore, University Of Nebraska Press, Bookshop, Indiebound, or Barnes and Noble.

About Jewtina y Co.

Jewtina y Co. is a non-profit organization on a mission to nurture Latin-Jewish community, identity, leadership and resiliency, and celebrate Latin-Jewish heritage and multiculturalism. More at https://jewtina.org/.