Join us for an evening of readings and conversation with poets Daniela Naomi Molnar and Peter Cole.
Thank you to our cosponsors Jewish Book Council and The New York Review of Books.
Overview
Poet and artist Daniela Naomi Molnar and poet and translator Peter Cole bring their two works into conversation: Molnar’s PROTOCOLS: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025), a National Jewish Book Award finalist, and Cole’s On the Slaughter: Selected Poems (NYRB, 2025).
Both books perform a counterreading of sorts: of documents twisted by hatred, of histories that have been misread, suppressed, or weaponized. Together, Daniela and Peter will explore what it means to answer violence with language, and what poetry can hold that other forms of witness cannot. The evening features readings by both poets interspersed with a conversation moderated by Ayin Editorial Director Eden Pearlstein and a Q&A.
About the speakers
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her work centers on memory—planetary, cultural, familial, and personal. She makes pigments from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters such as rainwater and glacial melt, and uses them in paintings and installations; poems and essays are created alongside the visual art. The practices are inextricable. Her visual work is held in public and private collections internationally and has been exhibited widely. Her debut book CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025) is a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Memory of a Larger Mind will be published by Omnidawn in October 2026.
Peter Cole is a poet and translator. His most recent book of poems is Draw Me After (FSG). His new translations include Requiem, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions) and On the Slaughter: Selected Poems, by Haim Nahman Bialik (NYRB), and he recently published That Simple?… That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation (Free Poetry). Cole has translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern, and has received numerous honors for his work, including a PEN Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Jewish Book Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
Eden Pearlstein is a multimedia language–artist and cofounder of Ayin Press. He is the author of Nothing Is for Everyone: Poems, a creative contributor to SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger, and editor of Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.