David Zwirner Books, the Academy of American Poets, and McNally Jackson invite you to join poets, critics and curators on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, at 12 p.m. EDT, as they read from and discuss Yayoi Kusama’s most personal book to date. Celebrating the relationship between visual art and language, this wide-ranging conversation focuses on the state of poetry today.
Every Day I Pray for Love brings us into Kusama’s private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.
This conversation will be moderated by Lara Mimosa Montes, and feature poets Rachel Eliza Griffiths and Paul Tran, and curator Stephanie Rosenthal. ASL interpretation will be provided.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, photographer, and novelist. Her hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is the recipient of fellowships including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her novel Promise is forthcoming from Random House.
Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is a senior editor of Triple Canopy.
Stephanie Rosenthal has been Director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin since 2018. She has curated numerous exhibitions including Lee Bul: Crash (2018), Garden of Earthly Delights (2019), Wu Tsang: There is no non-violent way to look at somebody (2019), Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, and Otobong Nkanga: There Is No Such Thing as Solid Ground (2020).
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, forthcoming from Penguin in February 2022. Their work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes with Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.