Hirstory: Poets Read Recent Work

Hirstory

Poets Include: Marie-Claire Picher, Shelley Hirsch, Emily Hockaday, Diane Ludin

Hirstory is a mode of storytelling/poetics that uses a fragmented and nonlinear point of view. We build together a subject woven amongst many varying threads/dimensions of reality.

Marie-Claire Picher, Ph.D., is a writer, popular educator, and Theater of the Oppressed facilitator. She is a founding member of the New York City-based collective Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) (1990).  A former Executive Director of the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School (1989-93), and active member until its closing in 2014, she also co-founded the Institute of Popular Education at the Brecht Forum (1992). She has presented training workshops in community rebuilding, healing and organizing in New York and throughout the United States, as well as in Cuba, Guatemala and Mexico.  She is an Associate Professor of French Emerita at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, New York.

Shelley Hirsch is an award winning, critically acclaimed vocal artist, composer, and storyteller whose mostly solo compositions, staged multimedia works, improvisations, radio plays, installations and collaborations have been produced and presented in concert halls, clubs, festivals, theaters, museums, galleries and on radio, film and television and on print  on 5 continents and can be heard on over 70 recordings. Hirsch has received numerous awards in both music and multidisciplinary fields including  a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award in 2017. Hirsch was born and raised in East New York Brooklyn.

Emily Hockaday is the author of Naming the Ghost, published by Cornerstone Press, and a second collection, forthcoming from Small Harbor Publishing. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently Beach Vocabulary, and is a Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation and New York City Artist Corps grant winner. She was a 2022 poetry resident at the Bethany Arts Community and the Middle House Review editor's prize winner. She lives in Queens.

Diane Ludin is a Poet, Media Artist and Product Manager. Born in New York, she studied Drawing and Installation at the State University of New York at Purchase (1989-1993), Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts in (1998-2000) and Integrated Digital Media (2009-2012) at NYU Tandon. She has taught Internet media production and practical theory at  Adelphi University, School of Visual Arts and NYU. She has exhibited her Internet and Media Installation work throughout the US, Europe and Australia. She has completed web-based commissions for the Walker Art Center, New Radio and Performing Arts and Franklin Furnace.

Additional Credits 

Graphic Designer: Theres Wegmann