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Join us for a reading with Pamela L. Laskin for her latest novel Words Unwhispered (Cervena Barva Press 2023).

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

WORDS UNWHISPERED is a book of ghazals written during the pandemic. Why the ghazal? It is a lyric form that expresses sorrow and grief in the best possible way. I would like to think of these poems as songs of sorrow since the beginning of COVID and the subsequent months that followed were times of isolation, loneliness, and enormous despair. In amidst these myriad of feelings were the small moments of grace: watching television indoors with a loved one; a special phone call; dreams of a time when we could all emerge outside of this black box, when our words would spin in the wind, unwhispered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pamela L. Laskin is a lecturer in the English Department at City College, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate Children’s Writing, and directs the Poetry Outreach Center. Several of her children’s and poetry books have been published. RONIT AND JAMIL, A Palestinian/Israeli ROMEO AND JULIET in verse was published by Harper Collins in 2017, and was named among the 35 books to have on your radar for 2017. BEA, a picture book, was a finalist for the Katherine Paterson Prize for Children’s Fiction in 2018. She is the winner of the 2018 International Fiction Prize from Leapfrog Press, and WHY NO BHINE, an epistolary novel about the Rohingya Muslims, was published in 2019. The Operating System published a bilingual picture book, MONSTER MARIA, which is about Hurricane Maria, and is being used as a fundraiser for after-school programs in Puerto Rico. Linus Press published MY SECRET WISH about families seeking asylum, and is also being used as a fundraiser for Immigrant Families Together.