A reading centered on how language is a constant healing force in dealing with trauma. Writers will read from work which explores, enacts, and/or responds to experienced traumas. The language of trauma, its silence, fragmentation, inheritance. How trauma settles on the page. How trauma settles in us.

CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of four collections of poetry: Ruin, The Glimmering Room, and Wunderkammer. Her fourth collection, How the End Begins, was published in March of 2016. Her essays, interviews and art writing have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and Hyperallergic. Cruz has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts.
 
JAKE MATKOV writes poetry in Brooklyn, NY where he teaches first year writing and is the coordinator of the English graduate programs at LIU Brooklyn. He is a co-founding editor of visceral brooklyn and co-curates its reading series of the same name. A 2015-16 Queer Art Mentorship fellow, his poems have been published in fields magazine, voicemail poems, Maudlin House, thosethatthis, Downtown Brooklyn and others.
 
HEIDI ANDREA RESTREPO RHODES is a queer, mixed-race, second-generation Colombian immigrant, writer, scholar, artist, and activist. Her creative work and performance has been seen in numerous places, including San Francisco’s SomArts, Galería de la Raza, the 2014 National Queer Arts Festival, As/Us, Decomp, Feminist Studies Journal, Write Bloody’s We Will Be Shelter, and others. Her chapbook, ‘The Inheritance of Haunting’ is due out by Raspa Press in fall 2016. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
 
CHARIF SHANAHAN is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming in 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Apogee, Boston Review, Callaloo, Literary Hub, The New Republic, Phantom Books, and Prairie Schooner. His translations from Italian and German have appeared in A Public Space, Circumference, and RHINO Poetry, among other publications, and have been performed by the Vienna Art Orchestra. Formerly Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, the Starworks Foundation, and Stanford University, where he will be a ’16-’18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry.