Bay Area poets Judy Halebsky and Amanda Moore join Jen Siraganian in celebration of her debut poetry collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, with a special reading and sharing of new poems.
Book sales to follow.
In her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead (Perugia Press, 2026), Jen Siraganian traces a self shaped by history, fragmentation, and memory as she weaves her family’s past in the Middle East with her identity as an Armenian-American woman and mother. Whether portraying a grandparent’s survival during the Armenian Genocide, a father’s childhood in 1940s Palestine, or a son’s birth when “death is a neighbor,” Siraganian’s poems interrogate concepts of home, origins, belonging, and displacement. Using a docupoetic lens, the poet braids narratives with archival photographs and artifacts to chart cycles of cultural and historic erasure while enacting an intertextual conversation with artists of the diaspora, and with art itself. Through poems that seed each other with recurring images of pomegranates, mushrooms, and fire, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead pushes against annihilation with a voice that resists silence.
Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, former poet laureate of Los Gatos, CA, and author of Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, which won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize. Her poems have won the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize, and appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2016 and 2025, Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, she is a Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center.
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, including Sky=Empty which won the New Issues Prize. With Ayako Takahashi, she translated Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi. A fan of urban hikes, walking as transportation, and aimless wandering, she lives in the East Bay.
Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (Ecco 2021), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, and Ploughshares. She is a teacher and editor who lives in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.
Poetry
Programs designed to celebrate the art of the poem, including readings and talks.
SWANA Interest
This program honors the diverse cultures, traditions and histories of Southwest Asian and North African heritage.