EventsThe New Social Environment#206
Radical Poetry Reading with Bennet Bergman
Featuring political poetry read by Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Shiv Kotecha, Benjamin Krusling, and Layli Long Soldier.
Wednesday, January 6, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Poet Bennet Bergman curates the 21st Radical Poetry Reading of 2021, featuring Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Shiv Kotecha, Benjamin Krusling, and Layli Long Soldier.
In this Talk
Bennet Bergman

Bennet Bergman is a poet, educator, and publisher. He earned a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and Electric Literature. He is the founder and editor of Changes, a nonprofit press dedicated to publishing exceptional poetry by emerging writers in the United States. He lives in New York City.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a poet and translator. Rodríguez is the editor of Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews (Kenning Editions, 2020). Her translations include the Pornomiseria Manifesto by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo (2017) and Ecogenoethnocide by Santiago Arboleda Quiñonez (2018).
Shiv Kotecha
Shiv Kotecha is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). He writes about art, film, and literature for frieze. He’s written elswhere on the internet, holds a PhD in English from New York University and teaches poetry for NYU’s XE Experimental Humanties Deparment.
Benjamin Krusling
Benjamin Krusling is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. his first book, Glaring, is forthcoming in summer 2020 from Wendy’s Subway.
Layli Long Soldier

Poet, writer, and activist Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award and a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨