In Animal Bodies, Herzog’s limited-edition broadside, created in conjunction with the exhibition Elana Herzog: Ripped, Tangled, and Frayed (2023) at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, features one-of-a-kind paper artworks by Herzog made in collaboration with master paper maker Mina Takahashi of Round Top Paper and Brenda Coultas.

We are honored to announce that as part of Animal Bodies, Coultas has invited Eleni Sikelianos to our evening of readings inspired by many ideas that also arise in the exhibition.

Coultas and Sikelianos, close friends, since the 90s, when Brenda moved to New York City to work on the staff of the Poetry Project is a 2026 grant recipient from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Coultas' essay on her origins as a poet can be found in the anthology Other Influences: Essays on Feminist Avant-garde Poetic Lineages.  Her latest collection, The Writing of an Hour, an ars poetica, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022.

Born into a family of bohemians, poets, tree workers, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres" (TimeOut). She is the author of a trilogy of hybrid memoirs, most recently Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026), and ten books of poetry, including Your Kingdom and The California Poem. Sikelianos will read from her most recent book, Memory Rehearsal (2026), drawing our attention to the motifs of threads, repair, of images of the loom as they surface in the story of her ancestor, the composer choreographer, master weaver, and Sapphic feminist, Eva Palmer-Sikelianos.