Donna Stonecipher will read from her recently published book The Ruins of Nostalgia, named a best book of 2023 by NPR, a poetic reconsideration of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical idea.
Some of the poems address gentrification and the nostalgia it can engender. Nostalgia originally meant, essentially, a kind of homesickness, and these poems explore longing for a past that included a sense of a “home” that no longer exists, at least in part because the speakers can no longer afford to live there.Donna Stonecipher is the author of six books of poetry, including Transaction Histories, which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). Her poems have been translated into seven languages, and her translation of Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull.
Davy Knittle (University of Delaware) researches and teaches queer and trans theory, U.S. literature, and the urban and environmental humanities.
Davy’s current book project is entitled “Urbanist Desire and the Ecology of Queer and Trans Survival.” From 2016-2021, Knittle curated the City Planning Poetics talk and reading series at the University of Pennsylvania to bring together poets with urban planners, designers, planning historians, or others working in the field of city planning.
