Readings with Dorothea Lasky and Kirsty Bell

The Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg is delighted to invite you to an evening of readings by writers Dorothea Lasky and Kirsty Bell on Friday, June 26 at 6:30pm, conceived in close collaboration with Jason Dodge.

In 2012, Jason Dodge founded the poetry press Fivehundred places, which regularly publishes contemporary poetry in limited editions of 500 copies, including works by Melissa Buzzeo, CAConrad, Ishion Hutchinson, Ilya Kaminsky, Dorothea Lasky, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Ariana Reines, Bianca Stone, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and others. Fivehundred places is rooted in the belief that a poem can find its readership through intimate, unpredictable paths and in a variety of contexts, beyond the framework of conventional publishing infrastructure.

The evening at the Kunsthalle grows out of Jason Dodge’s sustained interest in the work of contemporary poets. Inviting Dorothea Lasky and Kirsty Bell to read selected texts at the Kunsthalle, their writing enters into a relation of poetic kinship with his artistic practice, opening unexpected connections between exhibition, texts, voices, and objects on view.

Dorothea Lasky is a poet living in New York. She is the author of a dozen collections of poetry and prose, including, MEMORY (Semiotext(e)/Silver Press), Mother (Wave Books), The Shining (Wave Books), Animal (Wave Books) and ROME (Liveright/W.W. Norton). She is the editor of Essays (Essay Press) and a co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s). Her novel, Katie, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review, among other places. She is currently writing a book on Sappho for Columbia University Press. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry concentration.

Kirsty Bell is a writer and art critic living in Berlin. She is the author of The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin (2022) and The Artist’s House. From Workplace to Artwork (2013). Her art criticism and essays have been widely published since 2001 in international art journals, artists’ books and exhibition catalogues. Her next book Mother’s Mother, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions in Spring 2027.