Tag: books

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Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition Anthology Launch feat. Rita Banerjee – September 18, 6:30 pm EDT on Zoom

On September 18, 6:30 pm EDT, Shanta Lee and Philip Brady, the editors of Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, will be celebrating the launch of their new anthology with a reading featuring their Sign & Breath Authors. Featured authors will include Tim Seibles, Rita Banerjee, Diana Whitney, Ru Freeman, Diane Raptosh, Philip Metres, Haleh Gafori, Claire Bateman, Carolyn Finney, and Bruce Smith. Please register on Zoom to attend the reading at 6:30 pm EDT.

Rita Banerjee will be reading from her flash essay “The Spirit Door” during the Sign & Breath Reading Launch.

Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voice?

Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book features poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. Readers are introduced to a text followed by a discussion with the author about creating the piece, ties to creative lineage, and the definition of voice through their practice. This anthology contributes to the dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective on poetry while two questions remain: Do we have a clearer understanding of what defines poetry? Do we have a clearer understanding of voice?

Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition debuted on August 26, 2025. You can order Sign & Breath here and read Rita Banerjee’s personal flash essay “The Spirit Door” and interview, which are featured in the anthology.

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South Asian Avant-Garde’s 2024 in Reading feat. Rita Banerjee

In describing the complex and thought-provoking readings of the SAAG Masthead in 2024, Associate Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde Iman Iftikhar writes, “Reading in 2024 often felt like fumbling for grounding amidst relentless upheaval. At times, it offered escape and solace. At others, it demanded grappling, interrogation, and a necessary confrontation. Whether through poetry, history, fiction, or essays, our reading this year insisted on engagement: on seeing, feeling, and remembering to live, even when it felt unbearable.

“These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s ‘best; books or ‘essential reads.’ Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. Our favorites include a novel set in Baltimore tracing the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, texts that provide much needed clarity on revolutionary politics, a quiet yet searing study of sound and space, some comfort reads, and much more. These books held mirrors to the year and world we lived through, compelling us to look even closer when we could not look away. Here, in the voices of those who read and felt with these works, we share not only our most loved reads of the year but the struggles they opened up for us, allowing us to see anew.”

And of her selected readings in 2024, SAAG Editor Rita Banerjee writes:

“This year, every book I read felt like a knock-out including: Animal by Dorothea Lasky, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Letters to a Writer of Color edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro, Fling Diction by Frances Canon, Riambel by Priya Hein, Dumb Luck and Other Poems by Christine Kitano, Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka, Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace, Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen, A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn, and The Psychology of Supremacy by Dwight Turner, among many others. Each book I read challenged and changed my approach to creative writing craft, human psychology, how we process social trauma, and what we can learn from community, as well as demanding systemic change. 

One poetry collection that showed me how form could explode on the page, and how polyvocality and the acknowledgement of our ancestors could be conveyed, was JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies. The collection plays with the idea of “Master of Ceremonies” as someone who both entertains and has authority over the stage. With his stutter, Ellis has difficulty pronouncing ‘master’ (which then becomes ‘aster’ in his work). Throughout the collection, Ellis interrogates the notion of master, both as the figurehead who controls the lives of others, often under authoritarian or tyrannical rule, and as a symbol of accomplishment and the mastery of craft.”

Check out the South Asian Avant-Garde‘s 2024 in Reading here.