In March, our second round of Personal Velocity is on 3/31 and features four readers: Wei Tchou, Eshani Surya, Camellia-Berry Grass, and Olga Mikolaivna.
Organized by Katie Bennett, Personal Velocity is a monthly reading series featuring personal essays by women, nonbinary, and trans writers. The series will run every month from Aug '25 - Aug '26, thanks to a generous grant from Penn Treaty Special Services District.
About the readers:
Wei Tchou writes about culture, food, and Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, in the Lower East Side. Her memoir Little Seed (Deep Vellum, 2024) a sibling story and a cultural history of ferns, was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle award. She lives in New York City with her family.
Eshani Surya is the author of RAVISHING, recently out from Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic. A disabled South Asian writer, Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, an Asian Women Writer’s Workshop mentee, a Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop scholarship recipient, and a Mae Fellowship recipient. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, among others.
Camellia-Berry Grass is trying to live. She is the author of the lyric memoir Hall of Waters, and her essays appear in DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, the Texas Review, and Waxwing, among numerous other publications. Her work is widely anthologized; most recently in The Lyric Essay as Resistance from Wayne State University Press, and in Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music: The March Xness Anthology, from Split Lip Press. She lives in Philadelphia, and teaches writing at Rutgers University-Camden. She is looking for a good 2 bedroom apartment at a good price.
olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House, and “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming with Ursus Americanus Press. Her translation of Stanislav Belsky's first full length collection in English is out with Dialogos / Lavender Ink.