The Poetry Project

Reading

Writing Against Rent with Tracy Rosenthal

“When our roof swells with water, we pay for the privilege of having a roof. When the wet morass swells with mold, we pay for the privilege of being poisoned.”

If writing is a way of life, then it is also inseparable from the ways we have to live. To live, we have to have a home. But to have a home, we have to pay rent. In Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’s incisive book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, the authors lay bare the injustice of rent while showing how the tools we have as tenants—our rent checks, our bodies, and our relationships to each other—can be put to work to set it right. This April, the Poetry Project gathers writers and organizers whose laments, screeds, investigations, and tributes will speak to the degradations large and small that come from living under the thumb of landlords and developers, and to our shared struggle for a home in a rented world.

Full list of readers to come.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

Events