Presenting a poetry reading in celebration of Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s gorgeous, riveting new collection DYBBUK AMERICANA! Poets Niki Herd and Lauren Russell will read alongside Gottlieb-Miller to spotlight this exciting new book, which makes a hybrid text out of art, mysticism, and history, and takes the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor.

A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another’s body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one’s child.

Purchase DYBBUK AMERICANA Here!

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the author of Dybbuk Americana (Dybbuk Americana – Wesleyan University Press (weslpress.org), 2024) and The Art of Bagging (The Art of Bagging — Conduit, 2023). His poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing has also been published in Brooklyn Rail, Image, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, among other venues. Previously he served as Digital Nonfiction Editor and Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast. He has been awarded support from the University of Houston, Yiddish Book Center, MacDowell Colony, Yetzirah, and elsewhere.

Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Shedding Skin and the chapbook don’t you weep, and co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Gulf Coast, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. Herd earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She currently lives in St. Louis where she is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University.

Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.