Parallel Processes: Interactive Poetry Book Talk and Publishing Workshop

Wed, Apr 22, 2026

12:00 PM–2:30 PM

This event will take place in the DGSC Social and Working lounge (Room 5409 and Room 5414) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all. Registration Required.

Join the Poetic Research Entanglements for a spring afternoon of poetry talks and workshops, featuring Gauri Awasthi, poet of the forthcoming book Mother Wound, and Lina Bergamini, Director of Marketing & Community Engagement at Nightboat Books. This event foregrounds the parallel process of poiesis, publication, and circulation of poetry books in our current moment. Lunch will be served.

Poetic Research Entanglements, a working group at the CUNY Graduate Center, has organized this event as an opportunity to bring poetic scholars and practicing artists together. In this interactive event, we hope to indulge in Gauri’s talk on the process of writing Mother Wound and Lina’s workshop on taking your manuscript from draft to published. Bring your imaginations and curiosities, and learn more about participating in Poetic Research Entanglements.

Participants:

Gauri Awasthi, born and raised in Kanpur, India, has won fellowships from Yaddo, Hambidge Center, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and others. She lives in New York City, where she edits, teaches creative writing, and makes films. Her poetry collection, Mother Wound, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in October 2026.

Lina Bergamini. Photo by Sophie Joseph Schwartz.

Lina Bergamini is the Director of Marketing and Community Engagement at Nightboat Books. She has a BA from the New School and lives in Brooklyn.

**More About Poetic Research Entanglements Working Group**

Poetic Research Entanglements (PRE) is one specter of the global community interested in poetic inquiry. Open to research scholars, theorists, artists, and poets, we are a space to talk about poetry and poetics at the CUNY Graduate Center. We take up the form of bi-weekly discussions, occasional guest talks, poetry readings, works-in-progress forums, and experimental workshops. In this form, we encompass not just poetics as a field but invite its adjacent fields to nudge the shape that poetry forms. This includes decolonial studies, ecocriticism, gender studies, and affect theory. Hence, we foster interdisciplinary thought and generate our own poetic theories. Our conversations are guided toward collective understanding and questioning, emerging out of different poetic theories, generations of poets, and legacies of criticism. However, we like to walk freely on paths susceptible to lines of flight, hoping we reach somewhere new, where thresholds can be passed and captured from a different dimension.

This event is hosted by Poetic Research Entanglements (PRE) a working group sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Gradaute Center.