Oct. 5, 2023—Of Consequence hosted authors Linda Dittmar and Martha Collins to discuss Linda’s new book, Tracing Homeland; Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging.

Born in NYC in 1938, Linda Dittmar grew up in British Mandate Palestine as it became Israel. She served two years in the IDF and attended the Hebrew University before coming to study in the US. With a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University (1970), she taught 20th century fiction and film at the University of Massachusetts for forty years. During those years she taught at Tel Aviv University, lectured at the University of Paris, and won several grants and prizes, including two Fulbright grants to India, the second as Distinguished Chair. Her academic publications include the books From Hanoi to Hollywood; the Vietnam War in American Film and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, including decades of service on Radical Teacher‘s editorial board. 

Aug. 31, 2023—Jenn Budd, the only former U.S. Border Patrol agent to continually blow the whistle on this federal agency’s rampant corruption, challenges us-as individuals and as a nation-to face the consequences of our actions. Her journey offers a vital perspective on the unfolding moral crisis of our time. She also gives harrowing testimony about rape culture, white privilege, women in law enforcement, LGBTQ issues, mental illness, survival and forgiveness.

Jenn Budd wrote Against the Wall to heal herself from a traumatic childhood, a sexual assault she survived while in the Border Patrol academy and a serious suicide attempt in 2015. Much like our border wall, her personal walls did not keep her safe. Her trauma and the trauma she caused others only began to heal when she began tearing down her personal walls and facing her own prejudices and racism . . . “I hope my memoir will prompt more citizens to face our prejudices, dismantle institutionalized racism and be willing to listen to those we’ve harmed.”

June 14, 2023—Dreaming the Mountain compiles and translates poems written over a period of almost forty years by Vietnamese Buddhist poet and scholar Tuệ Sỹ, who was imprisoned in Vietnam for fourteen years and at one point condemned to death. Translated by poet-translators Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins, the poems trace Tuệ Sỹ’s journey from his student and professor years in Saigon, through a time of solitude following the 1975 end of war, and into the years of his first imprisonment and temporary release. The book concludes with two poetic sequences written between 2000 and 2006.

March 16th, 2023—Acclaimed poets Matthew Thorburn and Aaron Caycedo-Kimura sat down with Consequence poetry editor Milica Mijatović and tackled some of the oldest questions surrounding whether writing can actually be taught, and how challenging subject matter like war and geopolitcal violence can be a fraught enterprise.

Aug 24, 2022—Pulitizer Prize winning poet Peter Balakian read from his latest book, No Sign (The Univeristy of Chcago Press, 2022) and took part in a Q&A with the audience.

From the Press: “In these poems, Peter Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture.”

Nov. 17, 2022—A discussion about the intergenerational legacies of violence as experienced by select writers from the new anthology, New Moons (Red Hen Press, 2021).

From the Introduction: “The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres—poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts which mix and match and blur all of these modes . . . the trajectories between the pieces—like that of kismet—will be multiple, nonlinear, abstract. The Muslim community is plural and contradictory. This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.”—Kazim Ali

Nov. 3, 2021—Acclaimed author Askold Melnyczuk reads from and holds a Q&A about his new book, The Man Who Would Not Bow (Grand Iota, 2021).

From the Los Angeles Review of Books: “One of the main themes of Melnyczuk’s stories is the haunting legacy of wartime suffering inherited from these departed parents. It is exactly this that pushes a young journalist from the United States, Oliver Street, to go to the Middle East to report on war in “Termites.” Having purposely experienced war firsthand, he now better understands the World War II experience of his mother Yulia, “whose stories about her war suddenly felt less abstract.”

May 17, 2021—Of Consequence partnered with the Paul Pratt Memorial Library of Cohasset, MA, to present author and Viet Nam veteran Stefan Lovasik and his third collection of poetry, The Latitude of a Mercy (NYQ Books, 2021). The event included select readings and a Q&A session.

From Small Press Distribution: ” … Lovasik offers a testament of unflinching immediacy, conflicted sensitivity, and lyric grace—poem after poem, wise without presumption, pared down to a breed of silent speech, the stubborn legacy of what must be said and all that never can.”

Feb. 25, 2021—Scholar Liat Berdugo and author Linda Dittmar discuss Liat’s new book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

From Bloomsbury: “Using video stills as core material, [Liat’s book] discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how Palestinians originally filmed to ‘shoot back’ at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force.”