Bring Yetzirah to You: Jewish Poetry Salons & Yetzirah Watch Parties

We believe an important part of supporting Jewish poets and Jewish poetry is helping people make connections in their own communities, helping facilitate local networks that encourage and inspire. After all, online friends can’t drop off soup and a good book when you have the flu.

So whether you’d like to hold an event at your synagogue or home, at a local bookstore or library, with your book club or writing group, or as part of a reading series, we’ve created some materials to assist you in hosting a successful gathering. 

Once you’ve got everything planned, send your event’s details to our intern Shelby Sizemore at [email protected], and we’ll add it to our community calendar. In your message, please include:

    • Name, date, and time of the event you’ll be hosting
    • Address of the event’s venue (if it’s in person)
    • Names of participating readers, hosts, etc.
    • A link to your event (if you have one)

October 2023: In these days when fear, dread, worry, and anguish are among our overwhelming emotions, and alongside these feelings, what we most want to do is help you feel less alone in this moment. If you’re considering bringing people together in your local community to share poems you’re finding meaningful in this time, which we believe can provide comfort in the face of this terror, we have adapted our Jewish Poetry Salon kit to help facilitate Jewish Poetry Salons of Community & Care.

As we continue our daily lives, as we should, let us build spaces in which to share our grief for the suffering of innocent people and to express our outrage against evil. Let us build spaces in which we can join together to find moments of comfort in poetry and each other.

So whether you’d like to hold an event at your synagogue or home, at a bookstore or library, with your book club or writing group, or as part of a local reading series, we’ve created some materials to assist you. 

For a JEWISH POETRY SALON OF COMMUNITY & CARE, you can download:

For a JEWISH POETRY SALON of featured local readers, perhaps preceded or followed by an open mic, you can download:

*As the programs we create and events we promote are an important part of our fundraising efforts, we’ve included a QR code on these documents linked to our donation page. We’d very much appreciate if you might encourage your community to help support Yetzirah’s literary efforts through their contributions.

A possible way to structure your event: at our first in-person poetry salon, hosted in someone’s home, we had three featured readers who read about 10-12 minutes each. Following the reading, after a break for snacks and drinks, every person there was invited to share a poem of either their own or by a Jewish poet they admire (they were notified in advance that they’d be invited to do this), which was a nice way to get more voices into the room and to learn about perhaps unknown-until-that-moment writers.

For a YETZIRAH WATCH PARTY of one our readings—live or recorded—you can download: