Presented by Goethe-Institut Boston and CGES Online
Two women writers talk about what it means to be a poet in today’s world. Which role can and should literature play while our societies are facing seemingly insurmountable challenges?
Esther Dischereit writes novels, short stories, essays, poetry and plays for radio and the stage. Based in Berlin, Dischereit is regarded a leading figure of second-generation German Jewish literature after the Holocaust. Her prose works include J
oëmis Tisch – Eine jüdische Geschichte (1988) (English title:
Joëmi’s Table),
Übungen jüdisch zu sein (1996) (English title:
Lessons in Being Jewish), and
Blumen für Otello. Über die Verbrechen von Jena (2014) (
Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes that Came Out of Jena, exp. in English 2021) about a series of racially motivated murders and bomb attacks committed by a terrorist organization called the National Socialist Underground (NSU) during 1998-2011. In 2020 she published
Sometimes a Single Leaf, a book of German poetry with English translations by Iain Galbraith, and a collection of essays entitled
Mama darf ich das Deutschlandlied singen (Mama, May I Sing the German National Anthem).
Writer/naturalist
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of
Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work, and
Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. Her poems and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. For the past twenty-some years, she has worked as a naturalist and guide. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor at the Alaska Quarterly Review, she lives on Cape Cod with her partner and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.
Presented in collaboration with the Center for German and European Studies, Brandeis University.
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