Reading Series: April 4: Ethel Rackin, Nicky Beer, and Wayne Koestenbaum
Register for this reading here.
You can order books from our readers here, with a percentage of every purchase going to support Yetzirah.
Ethel Rackin is the author of four books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; Evening (Furniture Press, 2017); and In Time (Word Works Books, 2025). She is also the author of the text Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022). Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and another collaborative sequence, “Silent e,” is included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Volt, and other journals. She earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. A MacDowell fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010) both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published 24 books, including Stubble Archipelago, Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His newest book, a novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, was published by FSG in 2026. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
As we want our events to be accessible to all, our tickets are offered free of charge. Yet if you’re able to donate—perhaps $18, or some multiple of 18, which in Jewish tradition signifies wishing long life and good luck to the recipient of the gift—all proceeds will go directly to supporting Yetzirah, making more events like this possible. Yetzirah is a nonprofit organization, and any gift you make is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by the law.
