Poetry of Peculiar Joys: Elegy, Memory, and Epiphany

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

10:30 PM

Arts & Culture

Poetry of Peculiar Joys: Elegy, Memory, and Epiphany

Ring Community Center at Luria Academy

664 Bergen St, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA

Poetry of Peculiar Joys: Elegy, Memory, and Epiphany

This gathering will bring together six contemporary Jewish poets from diverse backgrounds and experiences to share work on the transformative power of joy – from how elegy can lead to epiphanies, to re-envisioning and reframing our lives through various ways of letting go. Don’t miss this meaningful conversation with Jared Beloff, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jared Harél, Lynn Melnick, Jason Schneiderman, and Yerra Sugarman.

Poetry of Peculiar Joys will feature readings from each of the poets, followed by a conversation moderated by Jared Harél. After the conversation, we will engage in a community writing exercise facilitated by Harél to try our own hands at using poetry to move through loss towards joy.

This event will take place as part of Sukkot in The Neighborhood – a festival of Jewish arts, culture, and spirituality taking place in an art installation Sukkah in Brooklyn. Check out the full line-up of events here.

Featuring

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections, including the forthcoming The Last Great
Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027), a sequel to If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her work has been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Cafe Royal Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, APR, The Writer’s Chronicle, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Tin House, among others.

Jared Beloff

Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023) and the co-editor of Poets of Queens 2 (Poets of Queens, 2024). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, Image Journal, Pleiades and elsewhere. He is the Editor in Chief of Porcupine Literary. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. You can find him on his website www.jaredbeloff.com.

Yerra Sugarman

Yerra Sugarman’s three volumes of poetry are: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022), which won American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a
finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry; The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002), winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature, and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She serves on the Board of Directors of Yetzirah/a hearth for Jewish poetry, and co-curates its reading series. (Website: https://yerrasugarman.com/)

Lynn Melnick

Lynn Melnick is the author of three poetry collections, including, most recently Refusenik, winner of the Julie Suk award, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is also the author of the memoir, I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, most recently out in paperback with Spiegel & Grau. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New Republic, and A Public Space. She teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn with her family. You can find her online at: https://www.lynnmelnick.com

Jason Schneiderman

Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024); an essay collection Nothingism: Poetry at
the End of Print Culture (University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry 2025); a prosody manual Teaching Writing Through Poetry: An Introduction to Poetic Form (Bloomsbury 2026); and he edited the single topic reader Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and three installments of Best
American Poetry. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry
Society of America, the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, and a Fulbright Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and has been a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches
in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Jared Harél

Jared Harél’s most recent poetry collection, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), was selected by Kwame Dawes as the winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize and named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have recently appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Lit Hub, Ploughshares, Poem-A-Day, Southern Review and The Sun. Awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review as well as the William Matthews Prize from Asheville Poetry Review, Jared teaches writing, plays drums, coaches basketball, and lives with his family in Westchester, NY. For more info, visit jaredharel.com

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