In May, Personal Velocity will host writers Anni Liu, Yolanda Wisher, and Giada Scodellaro.

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 this month’s readers:

Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was named a best poetry book of the year by The New York Times. She is the recipient of an Undocupoets Fellowship, edits prose at Graywolf Press, and occasionally translates from Chinese. She lives in Philly and is learning to play pickleball.

A poet, musician, educator, and curator, Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro. She served as inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and as the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, she received the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award for her commitment to art for social change and was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band, Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters, and serves as Senior Curator at Monument Lab. 

Giada Scodellaro is the author of the collection Some of Them Will Carry Me (Dorothy, a publishing project), named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022. Her writings have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, Granta, and Brick, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Winner of The Novel Prize, her debut novel, Ruins, Child, is out now from New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU).