Sunday May 4, 3:00–5:00 PM
The Bureau
Room 210 of the LGBT Community Center
208 W 13th St., New York, NY 10014

The event will be also streamed on YouTube
Free, with suggested donations supporting The Bureau
Q&A Session and Refreshments

The Polish Cultural Institute New York and exquisites queer and trans reading series are excited to announce “Between Worlds, Between Words,” an afternoon of poetry and conversation celebrating the work of Irena Klepfisz at The Bureau General Services—Queer Division. Irena Klepsfisz is the author of several poetry collections including her newest publication, Her Birth and Later Years: Poems New and Collected 1971-2021, translated in English and Polish.

The afternoon at The Bureau will feature cross-generational readings by queer Jewish poets Ariel Goldberg, Clairette Atri Mizrahi, Ayaz O. Muratoglu, and Irena Klepfisz. Following the readings there will be a conversation moderated by danilo machado and Em Marie Kohl of exquisites, touching upon themes of diaspora, identity, and translation.

Irena Klepfisz is a lesbian poet, essayist, political activist, Yiddishist, and a practicing secular Jew. Born in 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto, Klepfisz spent part of the war in a Polish orphanage and part in hiding with her mother until liberation.  After a three-year stay in Sweden, they immigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled among Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors who were active Jewish Labor Bundists (Jewish socialists) in interwar Poland.

After settling in New York in 1949, Klepfisz would go on to write groundbreaking poetry through a lens of queerness that navigated the traumas of the holocaust. She would later dedicate herself to activism, serving a major role in the Jewish lesbian movement in the 1970s.

She was a co-founder and co-editor of the groundbreaking Conditions magazine, co-editor of The Tribe of Dina, and promoter and translator of the works of Yiddish women writers. She taught Jewish Women’s Studies at Barnard College for 22 years and English and Women’s Studies at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women. She has focused much of her activism on reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians. Her recent work Pomiędzy światami. Wybór wierszy i esejów / Between Worlds: Selected Poems and Essays, was the winner of the Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize from the Publishing Triangle and a finalist for the 2022 Jewish Book Council prize in poetry. In 2024, a bilingual edition of her poetry and prose appeared in Poland titled Pomiędzy światami. Wybór wierszy i esejów / Between Worlds: Selected Poems and Essays.

Klepfisz’s poetry is intersectional as it combines the many themes that have shaped her life, moving between the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and depictions of lesbian love and domestic life. Her poems also employ the Yiddish language within her English-language poetry. Yiddish is woven into and works together with the English, to create vivid depictions of people and politics, human conflict, and the experience of a refugee girl trying to survive.

As a scholar and translator, Klepfisz has been involved with crucial initiatives to recover the work of Yiddish women writers. Notably she has translated the Yiddish fiction of Kadya Molodowsky and Fradel Shtok, among others. Besides writing scholarly essays and publishing her translations, Klepfisz has brought Yiddish literature to life in two musical productions, Bread and Candy: Songs of the Holocaust, a Musical Drama for Five Voices, which premiered at The Jewish Museum in New York City in 1990, and Zeyere eygene verter/Their Own Words: Yiddish Women’s Voices, a bilingual musical performance piece of women’s poetry, stories, memoirs and songs, which premiered at The Jewish Museum in 1994.

Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and educator devoted to trans and queer lineages and lesser-known histories of photography. Goldberg’s books include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Their exhibition o Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s was on view from 2022-2024 in at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Leslie-Lohman Museum in NYC, and the Chicago Cultural Center. Goldberg was a recipient of the 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Book Grant and a 2024 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow at the New York Public Library, to support their book-in-progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late 20th century. A proud member of ACT-UAW 7902, Goldberg has taught at Bard College, The New School, New York University, Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and Rutgers University. Goldberg is in the Winter 2025 Apprenticeship Program at the New York Peace Institute and works independently as a Conflict Mediator.

Clairette Atri Mizrahi studied Social Psychology at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University
and is currently working on her PhD in Critical Social / Personality Psychology at the Graduate Center (CUNY) in NYC. Her first poetry collection, De la Boca de Mi Madre (self-published), explores the intergenerational saying-without-saying, an alternative way of using language, of Syrian-Jewish women in Mexico. Her theater script Nunca estás y estás has been selected for various staged readings and play development programs including Cimientos (2024) at IATI Theater and DramaLab (2019) at King Juan Carlos I Center.

Ayaz Orme Muratoglu is a poet, critic, and translator working between Istanbul and New York. From 2022-24, he worked as an audio and technical manager at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, and he curated and edited the 2023-24 chapbook series for the feminist poetry press Belladonna*. Ayaz was born on a Tuesday in April.