Writing in Conflict: A Reading & Communal Discussion

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2024 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT.

To center work that deliberates our place in broken institutions, that grapples with precarious political conditions, that narrativizes ongoing conflict with urgency, Radix Printing & Publishing Cooperative presents a reading and communal discussion about literature as a political response. We can go back centuries to find evocative, contentious works of poetry, playwriting, visual narratives, and fiction that tackle, directly and through powerful analogy, the claws of militarism, autocracy, and majoritarianism. But what does it mean to write in the moment of upheaval, to put into words the cost to life and land, to write with both tenderness and responsibility?

Join us to hear authors Yashica Dutt, Marwa Helal, noam keim, Kyle Carrero Lopez, and Devika Rege share excerpts from their works and discuss the ethics, approach, and urgency to political literature.

Where:
McKinney Chapel
First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn
119-121 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

About the Authors:

Yashica Dutt is an internationally acclaimed Dalit journalist, award-winning author of Coming Out as Dalit (Beacon Press, 2024), and among the most recognized global feminist voices on caste. Dutt's work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic, and she has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, PBS Newshour and at the Lincoln Center. Her writing has been part of Pen America’s India at 75 anthology that featured prominent Indian writers looking back on India’s 75th year of independence, and a collection titled Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers.

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). She has been awarded fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Paris Review, POETRY Magazine, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018.

noam keim (they/them) is a trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur freak. Their non-fiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: reverence to the land, healing, queerness, colonialism, plants, abolition. They are a Lambda Literary ’22 Fellow, an RWW ’23 Fellow, a Tin House ’23 Fellow, a Sewanee ’23 contributor and a Periplus ’23 Fellow mentored by Grace Talusan. Their debut essay collection, THE LAND IS HOLY, was published by Radix in 2024. Connect on Twitter and IG: thelandisholy or .

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Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists, and his debut full-length collection PARTY LINE is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2026.

Devika Rege is the author of Quarterlife. The novel came out in India in 2023, where it was hailed as 'a landmark novel' by The Indian Express. It was also a finalist for multiple literary awards, eventually winning the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award and the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman. It will be published in the USA and elsewhere in 2024. Devika is a graduate of the universities of Mumbai and Iowa, and lives in Bangalore.