Tzvi Mayer, Anna Cwalina, Kati Katchever, & Rakeem Shah
Saturday, November 14th @ 7:00pm
At the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts - 926 East Center Street
Join us for an evening of expanded poetry, ritual, song, and invitation as we bear witness and move together through themes and pathways of embodiment, identity, transformation, grief, living between worlds and cultures, familial relations, ancestral inheritance, historic and lived trauma, layers of violence, tenderness, elemental wisdom, and relationship within our natural world and beyond.
How do we witness one another? Offer, receive, and embody presence as medicine, as art, as devotion? How do we root ourselves in relationality and cycles of nature and spirit in times of transition?
Unfurling at times from each artist’s performance we may offer various invitations for active engagement and co-creation. We will orient ourselves in the wisdom of the Cycles. May our voices and vessels resonate together through grief and awe and all that is between.
Artist Blurbs:
Kati Katchever is a songpoet in hues of high blue and deep amber, a flute-throated loon catching light between dusk and dawn. Kati performs an intimate mix of poems and genre-defying songpoems imbuing each with her soulful, intuitive approach to expanding hearts and minds. Kati is a deep lover of the natural world who explores the spaces where light and body meet and co-create.
Instagram: @katikatchever
Tzvi Mayer lives on the land of many mounds on the shores of lake Michigan, aka Milwaukee. A writer with quiet intensity, they work in forms of documentary poetics to orient to ecologies of erasure. Tzvi Mayer’s work has been featured in Stencil Pirates (2004), The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013), Hitting a Wall: Jewish Narratives Confronting the Occupation (2017), and Rejoinder Journal (2026).
For over two decades, Mayer has worked as a co-regulator with youth navigating complex trauma in a brutal world.
Anna Cwalina is a bicultural teacher, artist, ceremonialist, mother, and creative writer. She teaches Polish and English language classes, and facilitates creative expression and healing rituals with individuals and communities. She has an MA in English Linguistics from UW-Milwaukee and a BFA in Painting from MIAD. She grew up in Poland and studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the U.S. Her poetry examines the themes of motherhood, rootedness in the natural world, ritual, living between cultures, memory, loss, and being a witness to violence and destruction, among others.
Substack/Facebook/Instagram: @Anna's Garden Rites
Rakeem Shah is a writer and moving image artist born and raised in London, UK. He is currently completing his MFA in filmmaking at UWM with a focus on the poetics of transsexual philosophies and migration, having previously studied philosophy and literature at Goldsmiths. His written and visual work deals with themes of self-invention, psychosexual geographies, faith, and untangling the various threads that create ideas of selfhood by way of abstracting ancestry, religion, and diasporas. He was once a notorious MC and spoken word poet in the dusty corners of English pubs, and has been published by the 87Press, Dazed & Confused, Thiiird Magazine, Gal-Dem, Abstractions, Fringe of Colour, and The BBC. He has toured his writing and has screened internationally throughout the UK, the US, Iran, Canada, and Europe.
Instagram: @_rakeem_s
Date: November 14
Time: 7:00
Cover: $10-15 (notaflof)