Next Up to The Mic: Judith Kerman at The Social Justice Center

This week, Thom Francis welcomes Judith Kerman to the mic. She shared her work as the featured reader at the Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center in Albany, NY, on August 21, 2025. +++++ For over 20 years, Dan Wilcox has hosted the Third Thursday Poetry Night, welcoming poets and writers from all over the region and beyond. This open mic with a featured reader series has seen hundreds of poets take the stage and share their work with a vibrant audience of artists, writers, and creators young and old. Whether it’s your first time reading poetry in public or you have been around the local literary community for years, the Third Thursday Poetry Night always feels like home. Last August, poet Judith Kerman was the featured reader. As host Dan Wilcox noted on his blog, “She began, & continued, with poems that pretend to be, or are, definitions, from her book Definitions; her first example was “Diaspora" in nine small parts, images, obliquely, historically responding to the dictionary definition.” She continued with the philosophical “Algorhythm” and “Canned Soup,” a prose poem and meditation on soup. She wrapped up her set with “Scoliosis,” “Why I Never Married,” and one final definition poem, “Israel,” in 10 tiny parts. Judith Kerman is a poet, performer, and artist who has published ten books or chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent work, Definitions, was published by Fomite Press in 2021. She has published two translations from Spanish: A Woman in Her Garden: Selected Poems of Dulce María Loynaz (White Pine Press, 2002) and Praises and Offenses: Three Women Poets from the Dominican Republic (BOA Editions, 2009). Kerman was a Fulbright Scholar to the Dominican Republic, where she translated poetry and fiction by Dominican women. She was also awarded the Abbie M. Kopps Poetry Prize and an Honorable Mention from the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.