Making a Home: Poetry in the Sukkah 9/17

September 29, 2026

6:30 PM

Arts & Culture

Making a Home: Poetry in the Sukkah

Luria Academy

664 Bergen St, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA

Making a Home: Poetry in the Sukkah will bring together five contemporary Jewish poets to share work on making home outside of conventional structures of belonging. Sometimes, our place of belonging must be found and assembled. What if home is not a place with four walls, but an experience of community, physicality, or bodily reclamation? What if a true home has no walls?

The evening will be moderated by Dan Kraines and feature readings from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Joy Ladin, Thea Matthews, and Yerra Sugarman. Afterwards, we will engage in a community writing exercise to try our own hands at using poetry to think about the homes we find after displacement.

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

Dan Kraines

Dan Kraines is a queer poet of Viennese, Bolivian, and Ukrainian heritage. His first book is Strap. Dan won the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Adjunct Teaching and they also teach creative writing to public high school students at Hawthornden Brooklyn. He previously worked for Sharon Olds. Queer Longing, their PhD dissertation, won the Susan B. Anthony prize for gender and sexuality studies from the University of Rochester. He lives in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side.

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: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. 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. You can find her work here.

Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin has long worked at the intersection of Jewish tradition and poetry, and has published eleven books of poetry, including Shekhinah Speaks; National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna; Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation, and, most recently, Family. She is also the author of three prose works: Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender; National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors. Her work is available at joyladin.com.

Thea Matthews

Thea Matthews is the author of GRIME (City Lights Books, 2025), winner of the 2026 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and Unearth [The Flowers] (Red Light Lit Press, 2020), which was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020. Originally from San Francisco, California, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing–Poetry from New York University and a BA in Sociology from UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Colorado Review, The Common, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, Alta Journal, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Yerra Sugarman

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird, published in 2022 by Four Way Books, which won the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General
Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, as well for the New
England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize; The Bag of Broken Glass, poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone, winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She holds an MFA in Painting from Columbia University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a community of survivors in Toronto. She is a Canadian American poet, essayist, and teacher, living in New York City, where she is a mentor in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and serves as a co-curator for Yetzirah / A Hearth for Jewish Poetry’s reading series. Her poetry, personal essays, translations, and critical articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, AGNI, New England Review, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, among other publications.

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