Trans and Genderqueer Poetry Symposium

Joy Ladin

Biography

Joy Ladin, Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University and the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, has published six books of poetry, whose poetic strategies were shaped by the exigencies of gender identity: Alternatives to History and The Book of Anna, both written through a mask of male identity (the speaker of Anna, a fictional concentration-camp survivor, is a persona created by a persona); Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration and Forward Fives winner Coming to Life, written to chart, articulate and create her emergent trans identity; Psalms, a book-length sequence which explores trans identity as a spiritual vantage point; and last year's The Definition of Joy, her first collection written with my identity as a premise rather than a problem or project. Her poems and essays have been widely published. She is also the author of a memoir, Forward Fives winner and National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, and a critical study, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry.

Workshop Description

Saturday, May 11 10:30-12: "I am `Woman' - now": Emily Dickinson's Transpoetics, and Ours." Dickinson wrote many poems, like "I'm `Wife," from which the workshop title is taken, that explore the difficulty of articulating a self that cannot be expressed through existing forms, bodies, labels, roles, conventions, blazing poetic trails through wilderness we, her trans descendants, call home. In this workshop, we will compare the existential and social problems she wrestles with, and the poetics she develops to wrestle with them, to our own.