Choice Words: Writers on Abortion
Featuring Annie Finch with contributors Mahogany Browne, Desiree Cooper, Camonghne Felix, Kristen Ghodsee, Katha Pollitt, and Manisha Sharma:
The debate about the morality, legality, and politics of abortion has reached a tragic impasse in the United States. What fresh perspectives, complex insights, and wisdom can poets, dramatists, and fiction writers bring to this crucial cultural discussion? BPL Presents and Annie Finch invite you join a discussion to examine what diverse literary artists have to say on this fundamental issue of reproductive and human freedom.
Brooklyn-based poet Annie Finch will facilitate. Finch is editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, the first major collection of literature about abortion by writers from the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries and across cultures, ethnicities, genders and sexualities. The book’s classic and contemporary writers—including Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Amy Tan, Ursula LeGuin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Anne Sexton, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Langston Hughes—show us how class, patriarchy, race, ethnicity, and faith traditions impact our understanding and experience of abortion—and how we can reclaim the power to define abortion for the coming world of freedom and justice.
Participants
Annie Finch, editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), is a poet, writer, and playwright. Her eighteen books include Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and a ritual verse drama on abortion, Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press), recipient of the Sarasvati Award. Finch’s work has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, and the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and translated into numerous languages. She has offered her incantatory poetry readings across the U.S. and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe, and her performance pieces and rituals for the stage have been produced at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Deepak Chopra Homespace, and American Opera Projects. Based in New York City and the Maine wilderness, she teaches meter and magic at PoetryWitchCommunity.org and travels to teach and perform.
Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center's Next 50 and Wesleyan's 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, the Executive Director of JustMedia, Artistic Director of Urban Word, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for Steppenwolf Theater), Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, and Black Girl Magic. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne is currently touring her latest poetry collection Chrome Valley, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was highlighted in The New York Times. She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, women's rights activist, and former communications director for Planned Parenthood of Michigan. Her acclaimed debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, explores the intimate experience of gender and race. In 2018, she wrote, produced, and co-directed The Choice, a short film about reproductive rights that has been selected by film festivals from Berlin to Los Angeles and Detroit. Her 2022 debut children’s book, Nothing Special, received a starred review from Booklist, a 2023 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, and was listed by the New York Public Library as one of the 10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.
Camonghne Felix is an American writer, poet, and communications strategist. In 2015, she was appointed as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s speechwriter, the first black woman and youngest person to serve in the role. She has worked as a senior manager of communications at Ms., as the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, and as vice president of strategic communications for Blue State, a digital strategy firm. Her debut poetry collection, Build Yourself A Boat, published by Haymarket Books, was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning author and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Baffler, Dissent, Jacobin, Ms. Magazine, Project Syndicate, The Lancet, and Jewish Currents. Her articles and essays have been translated into over 25 languages, and her work featured on radio and television, including Public Radio International's “The World,” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, France 24, and the PBS NewsHour. Ghodsee has won prestigious residential fellowships in the United States, Germany, France, and Finland as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Ghodsee is the author of twelve books, including: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, which has been translated into 15 languages, and Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiences Can Teach Us about the Good Life with Simon & Schuster in 2023.
Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation magazine. She is the author of four books of prose and two books of poetry. Her most recent book of poems is The Mind/Body Problem (Seren Books). Her most recent book of prose is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. She has won many awards for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, two National Magazine Awards, and a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Book Awards. She lives in New York City with her husband and cat. Photo credit Christina Pabst
Manisha Sharma is an award-winning poet and Lecturer in English at Iowa State University. Her poetry chapbook on the phenomenon of sex-selective abortions in India was a semi-finalist for the 2023 Iron Horse Literary Chapbook Contest. Her feminist poetry is published in Choice Words, Arts & Letters, Puerto Del Sol, Literary Mama, Fourth River, Madison Review and many other journals and anthologies. Her poetry on the Vanishing Girls of India has been set to music by renowned Australian composer Kim Cunio of the Australian National University. Sharma was an AWP Poetry mentee and was selected to attend writing residences at the Vermont Studio Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a certified yoga teacher who conducts yoga at writing conferences, residencies, and as part of her writing classes.
BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Featuring Annie Finch with contributors Mahogany Browne, Desiree Cooper, Camonghne Felix, Kristen Ghodsee, Katha Pollitt, and Manisha Sharma:
The debate about the morality, legality, and politics of abortion has reached a tragic impasse in the United States. What fresh perspectives, complex insights, and wisdom can poets, dramatists, and fiction writers bring to this crucial cultural discussion? BPL Presents and Annie Finch invite you join a discussion to examine what diverse literary artists have to say on this fundamental issue of reproductive and human freedom.
Brooklyn-based poet Annie Finch will facilitate. Finch is editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, the first major collection of literature about abortion by writers from the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries and across cultures, ethnicities, genders and sexualities. The book’s classic and contemporary writers—including Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Amy Tan, Ursula LeGuin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Anne Sexton, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Langston Hughes—show us how class, patriarchy, race, ethnicity, and faith traditions impact our understanding and experience of abortion—and how we can reclaim the power to define abortion for the coming world of freedom and justice.
Participants
Annie Finch, editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), is a poet, writer, and playwright. Her eighteen books include Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and a ritual verse drama on abortion, Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press), recipient of the Sarasvati Award. Finch’s work has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, and the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and translated into numerous languages. She has offered her incantatory poetry readings across the U.S. and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe, and her performance pieces and rituals for the stage have been produced at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Deepak Chopra Homespace, and American Opera Projects. Based in New York City and the Maine wilderness, she teaches meter and magic at PoetryWitchCommunity.org and travels to teach and perform.
Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center's Next 50 and Wesleyan's 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, the Executive Director of JustMedia, Artistic Director of Urban Word, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for Steppenwolf Theater), Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, and Black Girl Magic. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne is currently touring her latest poetry collection Chrome Valley, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was highlighted in The New York Times. She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, women's rights activist, and former communications director for Planned Parenthood of Michigan. Her acclaimed debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, explores the intimate experience of gender and race. In 2018, she wrote, produced, and co-directed The Choice, a short film about reproductive rights that has been selected by film festivals from Berlin to Los Angeles and Detroit. Her 2022 debut children’s book, Nothing Special, received a starred review from Booklist, a 2023 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, and was listed by the New York Public Library as one of the 10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.
Camonghne Felix is an American writer, poet, and communications strategist. In 2015, she was appointed as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s speechwriter, the first black woman and youngest person to serve in the role. She has worked as a senior manager of communications at Ms., as the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, and as vice president of strategic communications for Blue State, a digital strategy firm. Her debut poetry collection, Build Yourself A Boat, published by Haymarket Books, was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning author and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Baffler, Dissent, Jacobin, Ms. Magazine, Project Syndicate, The Lancet, and Jewish Currents. Her articles and essays have been translated into over 25 languages, and her work featured on radio and television, including Public Radio International's “The World,” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, France 24, and the PBS NewsHour. Ghodsee has won prestigious residential fellowships in the United States, Germany, France, and Finland as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Ghodsee is the author of twelve books, including: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, which has been translated into 15 languages, and Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiences Can Teach Us about the Good Life with Simon & Schuster in 2023.
Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation magazine. She is the author of four books of prose and two books of poetry. Her most recent book of poems is The Mind/Body Problem (Seren Books). Her most recent book of prose is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. She has won many awards for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, two National Magazine Awards, and a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Book Awards. She lives in New York City with her husband and cat. Photo credit Christina Pabst
Manisha Sharma is an award-winning poet and Lecturer in English at Iowa State University. Her poetry chapbook on the phenomenon of sex-selective abortions in India was a semi-finalist for the 2023 Iron Horse Literary Chapbook Contest. Her feminist poetry is published in Choice Words, Arts & Letters, Puerto Del Sol, Literary Mama, Fourth River, Madison Review and many other journals and anthologies. Her poetry on the Vanishing Girls of India has been set to music by renowned Australian composer Kim Cunio of the Australian National University. Sharma was an AWP Poetry mentee and was selected to attend writing residences at the Vermont Studio Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a certified yoga teacher who conducts yoga at writing conferences, residencies, and as part of her writing classes.