Professor Erika Meitner of Virginia Tech, nationally recognized and award-winning poet, joined UVA graduate students and Rachel Winer Manin Fellows Gahl Pratt Pardes and Raisa Tolchinsky for a collective reading and discussion of their work, mapping the connections between creative writing, poetry, and Jewish Studies. Professor Caroline Rody moderated.

Participants

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Gahl Pratt Pardes, Rachel Winer Manin Fellow in Jewish Studies, is a writer from the Negev Desert. Her work has received recognition or support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Henfield Prize for Fiction (runner-up), the Balch Prize for the Best Short Story, and others. She is currently an MFA candidate and Poe/Faulkner Fellow in fiction at UVA, where she teaches courses on creative writing and storytelling.

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Raisa Tolchinsky, Rachel Winer Manin Fellow in Jewish Studies, is a winner of the $10,000 Henfield Prize for Fiction and a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry. She received her B.A. in English Literature & Italian Studies from Bowdoin College & the University of Bologna. She has previously lived and worked in Chicago, New York, Italy, and Iceland and is trained as a boxer. She is currently an MFA student and Poe/Faulkner Fellow in poetry at UVA, and working on her first book.

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Caroline Rody – Professor of English, Director of the English Distinguished Majors Program, and Jewish Studies faculty member – will lead the conversation.

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Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Blue Mountain Center, and Bethany Arts Community. Meitner holds both an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MA in Religious Studies from UVA, where she was the Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and is currently a 2022 Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellow. Meitner is a professor of English at Virginia Tech.