Live Poetry Readings
Seeking Peace Through Poetry with Hila Ratzabi
When: Sunday, April 5, 2026 @
2:00 – 2:30 PM PDT / 3:00 PM MDT / 4:00 PM CDT / 5:00 PM EDT / 10:00 PM BST / 11:00 PM CEST
(Monday, April 6) 5:00 AM AWST / 7:00 AM AEST
Hila Ratzabi will share poems of witness, lament, and protest in response to the devastation in Israel and Palestine. Together we will hold space to grieve the losses of this most recent war and imagine a different way forward. Ratzabi will also share a bit about her journey as an Israeli-American peace activist volunteering with Friends of Standing Together, a movement of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel working toward equality, justice, and peace for all on the land. All are welcome.
Hila Ratzabi was born in Rehovot, Israel, and raised in Queens, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a gold Nautilus Book Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and other journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Chicago.
Poetry, Prayer, and Protest with Pádraig Ó Tuama
When: Sunday, April 12, 2026 @
2:00 – 2:30 PM PDT / 3:00 PM MDT / 4:00 PM CDT / 5:00 PM EDT / 10:00 PM BST / 11:00 PM CEST
(Monday, April 13) 5:00 AM AWST / 7:00 AM AEST
Register here!
Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work is often informed by prayer and sacred text. Far from devotional, though, his work is often searching, characterised by appeal rather than certitude. He delves into the gaps of sacred texts, looking for the strange, the curious, the disturbing, and the gathering.
Join him for this session of reading (and he’ll answer a few questions too).
Pádraig Ó Tuama (b. 1975 Cork, Ireland) is a poet with interests in conflict, language and religion. He presents Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios, and has published two anthologies (2022, 2025, both with WW Norton) from that podcast. In early 2025 Copper Canyon Press published Kitchen Hymns, his fourth poetry collection. A freelance artist, one of Ó Tuama’s projects is poet in residence with the Cooperation and Conflict Resolution Center at Columbia University. He serves as faculty at Yale Divinity School as a Professor in the practice of Spirituality. He splits his time between Belfast and New York City.
A Furious Blooming: Writing into Grief with Bushra Rehman
When: Sunday, April 19, 2026 @
2:00 – 2:30 PM PDT / 3:00 PM MDT / 4:00 PM CDT / 5:00 PM EDT / 10:00 PM GMT / 11:00 PM CET
(Monday) 5:00 AM AWST / 7:00 AM AEST
Register here!
When mothers are planted,
daughters begin a furious blooming.
~ Kamilah Aisha Moon, Initiation
Grief leaves us speechless. It throws us into the depths of silence. There are never the right words to say to those who are grieving—or to explain the depths of our own grief.
Grief is a door we are pushed through into a new world, a world we must learn to live in. We are never the same. How do we write from these new selves? How can we lean into our writing practice not only to survive the storms of grief, but also the storms unleashed in those we grieve alongside?
In this workshop, we will draw inspiration from writers who have broken through the boundary of wordlessness. We will gather—gently and honestly—bringing our grief journeys into shared space, if only for a moment. Together, we will write into our own experiences of loss, side by side, and not so alone.
Bushra Rehman is a writer, teaching artist, and cultural activist.
Her novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, a coming-of-age story about growing up Muslim and queer in New York City, was named a Best Book and Editor’s Choice by major national publications. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and author of the poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon and the dark comedy Corona, selected by the New York Public Library as a favorite book about NYC.
Rehman received the Queens Public Library Award for her contribution to literature in Queens.
This session will not be recorded.
Poetry as Medicine with Kaitlin Curtice
When: Sunday April 26, 2026 @
2:00 – 2:30 PM PDT / 3:00 PM MDT / 4:00 PM CDT / 5:00 PM EDT / 10:00 PM GMT / 11:00 PM CET
(Monday) 5:00 AM AWST / 7:00 AM AEST
Register here!
In a time when the world feels heavy, poetry becomes a form of medicine. It helps us alchemize what we are carrying—grief, beauty, rage, hope—into language that can hold and transform it.
In this session, we will explore how our words serve as medicine for ourselves, for one another, and for Mother Earth. Through guided readings and gentle journaling invitations, we will create space to listen inward, speak truth, and remember that expression itself can be an act of healing.
Together, we will reflect, write, and witness one another—honoring poetry not as performance, but as practice.
Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning poet, storyteller, and public theologian. She writes and speaks on spirituality, identity, justice, and belonging, weaving together Indigenous wisdom and contemplative practice.
Her latest book Everything Is a Story offers a hope-filled framework for reshaping our lives by reclaiming stories of courage, wholeness, and deep-rooted compassion. Other work includes Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God and Living Resistance, among other works. Through her writing and teaching, Curtice invites communities into deeper reflection, imagination, and collective healing.
