In June, Personal Velocity will host writers Marion Bell, Claire Marie Stancek, and Larissa Pham.

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:

Marion Bell is a poet who lives in Philadelphia. She is the author of Austerity (Radiator Press, 2019). More recent writing can be found in Recenter Press Poetry Journal.

Claire Marie Stancek is a writer, editor, and educator. She is author of five poetry books, including Double Life (Omnidawn Publishing, forthcoming 2027), Operating Moon (Pinsapo, 2026), wyrd] bird (Omnidawn, 2020), Oil Spell (Omnidawn, 2018), and MOUTHS (Noemi, 2017). With Daniel Benjamin, she co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba/Giramondo, 2016). With Jane Gregory and the late Lyn Hejinian, she co-founded Nion Editions, a chapbook press that she and Jane now co-edit. Claire Marie earned a B.A. from the University of Toronto and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Philadelphia.

Larissa Pham is the author of Discipline, a novel; Pop Song, an essay collection and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize; and Fantasian, a novella. She is an assistant professor of writing at the New School in New York City.