CANCELLED – The Journey Home: A Poetry Reading and Workshop with Irena Klepfisz and Madelaine Caritas Longman

Please note that this event has unfortunately been CANCELLED.

As part of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, we are delighted to invite you to a reading and workshop with New York-based Jewish poet, academic, feminist, and activist Irena Klepfisz alongside local author and poet Madelaine Caritas Longman.

The event will commence with a reading by Klepfisz from her collection of poetry, as with her award-winning Yiddish-English bilingual poem di rayze aheym / The Journey Home. A child survivor of the Holocaust, this poem reflects Klepfisz and her mother’s return visit to Poland in 1983 and Klepfisz’s reckoning and reclamation of a destroyed Polish Yiddish culture and language. Themes of estrangement, diaspora, and belonging will be explored across the poems. Interwoven throughout the readings will be a conversation with Longman, offering guiding context and reflection for our listeners.

Following the reading, Klepfisz will lead guests through a writing workshop inspired by her poem di rayze aheym/The Journey Home which asks participants to consider the idea of “home.” This will be an opportunity to read a curated selection of related poetry gathered together by Klepfisz, including her own work, and engage in inspiring dialogue with a pioneer in the rediscovery of Yiddish women writers.

$20 per person. Workshop materials provided. Due to limited capacity, pre-registration is highly encouraged. Click here to reserve your spot.

About Our Guests:

A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. Irena Klepfisz taught Jewish Women’s Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of five books of poetry including Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 (winner of the 2023 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; finalist for a 2023 National Jewish Book Award), Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and a collection of essays Dreams of an Insomniac. She is one of the foremost advocates of the Yiddish language and its renaissance in the United States. Her work has appeared in Tablet Magazine, The Manhattan Review, The Georgia Review, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Current, and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures.

Madelaine Caritas Longman‘s poetry collection, The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, Grain, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.

This program is presented in partnership with the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival and KlezKanada.

The night prior, on Wednesday, April 29th, Klepfisz will be performing her poem de rayze aheym alongside originally composed songs by Avi Fox-Rosen and klezmer fiddle virtuoso Alicia Svigals. Click here to learn more about this intimate concert organized by KlezKanada and Blue Met and to purchase your tickets.