Looking After: Conversations on Art and Healing

Poet and translator Sylvia Gorelick is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Poet and translator Christina Chalmers is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU, researching the relationship between the philosophy of history and the critique of the family in post-war Italy. She has produced a research film on critical distance and disaster preparedness (Exit Strategies, 2019), published book chapters on experimental film, and translated books on philosophy and psychoanalysis from Italian to English (Blinding Polyphemus, Geography and the Models of the World by Franco Farinelli and works by Elvio Fachinelli). Her published poetry includes Work Songs (Shit Valley Verlag: 2013); Willingness (Materials: 2016) and most recently, Truant of the Stintless Sun (1080 Press: 2021) and forthcoming, Subterflect (Distance No Object: 2021).

Writer Leopoldine Core has authored the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the story collection When Watched, which won a Whiting Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is a 2017 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland, PEN America, Apology Magazine and The Best American Short Stories, among others. She teaches at NYU and Columbia University.

Bahamian poet and essayist Bernard Ferguson is a MFA candidate at NYU. They are currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2023), about Hurricane Dorian and the effects of climate change on Small-Island Developing States. Bernard is the recipient of the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest, and many others. They served as Assistant Editor at Washington Square Review and received fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, NYU’s Global Research Initiative, and New York City’s Writers in the Public Schools. Their writing has been published in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the Best New Poets 2017 anthology and many other publications.

Translator, writer, scholar, and bookmaker Rebekah Smith is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse. She is the translator of Ova Completa by Susana Thénon (UDP, 2021) and co-translator of Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (UDP, 2016) and The Rou of Alch by Pablo Katchadjiann (UDP, 2016).