Jewish Poetry Salon

Featuring Meghan Sterling and Wendy Drexler

in Watertown

Join us on May 3, 2026, for a morning of Jewish poetry, featuring Olga Livshin and Shamar Hill!

DATE & TIME: Sunday, May 3, 2026, 10:30 AM

ADDRESS: Please RSVP at this Google Form to receive the address: https://tinyurl.com/bostonyetzirah 

Boston Area Yetzirah Salons feature local Jewish poets who will read original work and participate in a Q&A at a private home. We welcome poetry lovers of all traditions. 

Olga Livshin grew up in Ukraine and Russia, and came to the U.S. with her family as a teenager. Her poetry, essays, translations and interviews appear in POETRY, the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), and A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of the immigrant Russian Jewish poet Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). She has received fellowships to The Porches, Wildacres, Prospect Street House, and the Anderson Center at Tower View residencies, and has been a resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Philadelphia.

Shamar Hill is a poet, memoirist, and fellow of Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work draws on his Black and Jewish heritage to explore ancestral memory, displacement, and inherited trauma. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, and Washington Square Review, and his commentary in The Jerusalem Post. A protégé of E.L. Doctorow, he is at work on a memoir and a poetry manuscript. He is the Founding Director of Machshavah, a Jewish intellectual salon initiative, and in 2026 convened a sold-out 92NY panel on the bonds and tensions between Black and Jewish communities.

This event is inspired by Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the first national literary organization dedicated to fostering and supporting a community space for Jewish poets, nourishing writers and readers of Jewish poetry now and for generations to come.

Donations to Yetzirah are encouraged and greatly appreciated.

Yetzirah is recognized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization under the Internal Revenue code. Gifts made to Yetzirah are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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