Summer Report of Operations

Dear worldthreaders,

It’s been an intense summer of new connections, some great reconnections, and plenty of conspiring in the name of poetry, of empathy, of community, and of sunshine.

This is an international report, so please adjust your seats and let’s get traveling!

SVALBARD

In June, I had the fortune of visiting Svalbard for the first time, as part of La Impresora’s residency in ARTICA Svalbard, an artistic research centre in Longyearbyen. ARTICA is an international residency program and cultural platform that supports artists, writers, and researchers working in the Arctic, with a strong focus on ecology, global exchange, and the role of art in addressing the climate crisis.
https://www.articasvalbard.no/

La Impresora is a Puerto Rican independent publishing and editorial project, founded by Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Amanda Hernández. They have built an important space for experimental, community-based, and multilingual publishing, producing books and chapbooks that circulate contemporary Puerto Rican and international voices. Their vision is rooted in accessibility, collectivity, and literary innovation. As part of their catalogue, they published my bilingual book En las Fauces del Olvido / In the Jaws of Oblivion, and when they received the ARTICA residency, they invited me to join. Together, we hosted poetry readings, shared conversations about publishing as a practice of resilience, met artists from around the globe, and even had the rare gift of sailing to greet the glaciers.

https://la-impresora.mailchimpsites.com/

During my stay, I held three days of Poetic Consultations—a performance practice in which I meet participants one-on-one, listen to whatever they wish to share, and respond with a spontaneously written and read poem. These encounters are moments of intimate dialogue, where poetry becomes a vessel for listening, reflection, and care.

All these encounters were very intimate, powerful, moving, and truly reminded me of the power of poetry to connect, to heal, to bring us closer together, to reaffirm our identity.

US

Speaking of listening and poetry, I am honored to say that I am now a Certified Listener Poet, part of the non-profit The Good Listening Project, which works to bring poetry into healthcare environments as a tool for empathy, connection, and well-being. Their mission is to train poets in the art of attentive listening, and then transform patient and staff experiences in hospitals into poems that acknowledge, witness, and dignify their voices. My role with this project is not just to hold space as a Listener Poet in the context of healthcare, but to help them expand their organization to various territories, and, more importantly, to help expand representation of our BIPOC community within the project, so if this is a project (or more importantly, a path) that resonates with you, please visit:

https://www.goodlistening.org/

To join this community of poets feels deeply aligned with my own explorations of listening as an art form. The training provided tools to deepen presence and empathy, while also framing poetry as a practice of service and relational healing. I look forward to contributing more regularly to this work, and to weaving its approaches into my other projects across geographies.

SWEDEN

I am delighted to be announced as one of the residents of STPLN:LAB, a year-long residency at STPLN in Malmö—an interdisciplinary hub for independent creators. STPLN brings together artists, designers, activists, technologists, and cultural workers under one roof, encouraging collaboration across practices that don’t usually meet. It is precisely the kind of space where conversations about literature can spill into unexpected directions, from coding and design to performance and community organizing.

Over the next 12 months, I’ll be curating events and facilitating collaborations that connect deep listening and poetry with broader cultural and technological practices. My hope is to generate a series of encounters that make room for experimental publishing, sound explorations, and hybrid gatherings. I can’t wait to share more as the year unfolds. Thank you @stplnmalmo for trusting me with this opportunity.

You can learn more about their work here: https://stpln.org/.

WALES
This Sept 13, at the Creative Bridges Conference in Wales, I will be delivering the keynote Listening Between the Lines: Poetry as Pathways for Healing, Empathy, and Social Change. The conference focuses on intersections of writing, community practice, and wellbeing, situating creative methodologies within both therapeutic and cultural frameworks. My contribution positions poetry as a socially engaged practice that operates simultaneously on affective, linguistic, and political registers.

The keynote examines how attentive listening can be mobilized through literary practice to generate spaces of recognition and dialogue across difference. Drawing on my ongoing work with Red Door, the Poetic Phonotheque, The Good Listening Project and my own methodology of Poetic Consultations, I will outline how listening-based practices challenge dominant modes of communication by privileging relationality, vulnerability, and attentiveness. It’s all about listening. tuning in. being present.

Within the contexts of healthcare, migration, and intercultural exchange, I propose that poetry functions as a critical tool for articulating subjectivities often excluded from public discourse, while simultaneously fostering conditions for empathy and collective resilience.

This is a very nicely curated, inspiring conference, one I’ve watched be developed from behind the curtains, so I can wholeheartedly recommend it, and you can connect online wherever you are:
https://lapidus.org.uk/creative-bridges-2025/

MORE UK

There are just a couple of seats left for my Poetry School course Ecology of Memory: Multimedia, Transgenerational Ecopoetics which starts on October 8. This course explores how memory—personal, ancestral, ecological—can be activated in multimedia poetic practice. If you are interested, you can register here: https://poetryschool.com/courses/ecology-of-memory-multimedia-transgenerational-ecopoetics/.

In anticipation of the course, The Poetry School has just published an interview with me titled How to Write About Climate Crisis. In it, I discuss strategies for writing through the urgency of ecological collapse without reproducing despair, and ways to approach the topic with sensitivity and imagination.

You can read it here: https://poetryschool.com/how-to/how-to-write-about-climate-crisis/.

DENMARK

In Denmark, recent months have been shaped by translation and editorial work. I completed the translation of La Máquina, a long-form poetry novel by Uruguayan writer Lalo Barrubia, which has now been published in English as The Machine by Red Press. This project was supported by Promoción de Exportaciones de Uruguay and will be presented at Red Door on September 26. Barrubia’s work is notable for its hybrid form—oscillating between narrative and poetry—and its engagement with themes of gender, marginality, and urban precariousness. The translation process involved not only the rendering of language across Spanish and English, but also negotiations of rhythm, register, and cultural reference, foregrounding translation as both a literary and political practice. I am super excited to have Lalo back in Copenhagen for this book release and can’t wait for the performance she will do to activate this book. As if that weren’t enticing enough, we will count with the presence of Lorenzo Abattoir, a performance artist and experimental musician visiting us from Italy for this occasion.

Concurrently, in Copenhagen, this month we released issue 39 of Red Door Magazine, titled Impermanence, which features visual artist Simon Bang. This issue engages with questions of temporality and instability in contemporary art and literature. Calls for publication remain open, and we are also inviting new correspondents to contribute to the magazine’s evolving international network. In parallel, the Poetry Takeover OPEN MIC series at La Fée Verte continues to serve as a space of collective experimentation and multilingual performance, with its final sessions scheduled for September 25 and November 27.

These gatherings highlight the role of grassroots, community-driven platforms in sustaining a diverse literary ecology in Copenhagen, and I invite you to come be part of them, if not to share your own voice, to encourage those who come share their work, and those of us who keep hosting these events. Because trust me, we need that encouragement!

See the whole issue at: www.reddoormagazine.com

Speaking of encouragement, please save the date for the upcoming Nature & Culture: International Poetry FILM Festival, which takes place this October 11 at Husets Biograf, in Copenhagen…

and this November 11th in Calgary, CANADA.

You read it right. Canada.

For now, I can tell you the Poetic Phonotheque continues growing, and is now a registered non-profit organization in Canada. But more news about all of this will come very soon, in their very own post.

The adventures continue! Next up…

ICELAND!

Next week in Reykjavik, we will gather with Ós Pressan to launch the collaboration project Multilingual Writing LAB, developed within the Erasmus+ framework (2025–2026). The initiative connects Ós Pressan (Iceland) and Red Door (Denmark) to strengthen networks of writers and educators working across languages, cultures, and media.

The LAB focuses on inclusion and diversity in education, digital transformation, and creative practice, with particular attention to older youth and adults at risk of marginalization. Over the coming year, we will develop an online platform with resources and masterclasses, conduct research into multilingual writing education, and host workshops, training sessions, and public events across the Nordic region. This launch in Reykjavik marks the beginning of a collaborative process to test, share, and expand these methodologies through community engagement.

A little bit for everyone, online, on site, and hybrid, so you can’t say you didn’t hear about it. As a poet, as a writer, as an educator, as a lover of literature, as a publisher, or simply as a fiend of all things poetic, I truly hope one of these links I’ve just shared has something that moves you, inspires you, resonates with you.

So you see, my friends, this neverstoppin’ is a serious business.

Off I go, to continue worldthreading.

Thank you, as always, for your continued support. Please share this Patreon with your friends and others who might be interested in these projects, because all the support that can be given is more than welcome, to continue keepin’ up with the times.

https://www.patreon.com/madamneverstop

Love and poetry,

Madam Neverstop.