World Poetry Salon: Victoria Chang, yuniya edi kwon, and Patricio Ferrari

Join The New York Public Library and Limelight Poetry at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL) for the World Poetry Salon! 

Experience words and music from around the globe at the World Poetry Salon, a new series presented in partnership with Limelight Poetry, a local nonprofit dedicated to promoting world poetry. Each event features readings by a celebrated poet set to live music by a musician of the same cultural background. 

This salon will feature a reading by poet Victoria Chang accompanied by musician yuniya edi kwon. A printout will be available for attendees to follow along with Chang's poetry during the reading. Following the reading, Chang will be interviewed by event host Patricio Ferrari. 

To join in person | Please be sure to register for an In-Person Ticket. Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins.

For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. If you register for multiple tickets, please provide the name of each person who will be attending the event or arrive with your entire party present. Only registered patrons will be granted entry into the event space. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

If you have symptoms consistent with COVID-19 or suspect you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive, please stay home.

To join online | On the day of the event, registrants will receive a Youtube link to join the program. To receive an email reminder shortly in advance of the event, please be sure to register! If you encounter any issues, please join us on NYPL's YouTube channel.

ABOUT LIMELIGHT POETRY

Limelight Poetry is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting world poetry, founded in 2024 in New York City. It invites outstanding poets and artists from around the world to share their work in various forms, with the goal of showcasing poetry in underrepresented languages. Drawing on the city's rich cultural resources, Limelight Poetry connects poetry with other art forms, fostering a global exchange of poetic expression. It welcomes audiences into a vibrant and inspiring world of poetry, music and beyond.

ABOUT THE POET

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything and her nonfiction book, Dear Memory. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech. 

ABOUT THE MUSICIAN

yuniya edi kwon (b. 1989)yuniya edi kwon is a violinist, vocalist, and transdisciplinary performance maker based in New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer ancestral lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. In addition to an evolving solo practice, yuniya collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Du Yun, Holland Andrews, Tomeka Reid, and Degenerate Art Ensemble. Her work has been presented by Dia Art Foundation, Performa Biennial, New York Live Arts, Under The Radar Festival, National Sawdust, Roulette Intermedium, On The Boards, Asia Society, Harlem Stage, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Monheim Triennale, and others. She is a Guggenheim Fellow in Composition, Creative Capital Awardee, Arts Fellow at Princeton University, Civitella Ranieri Fellow, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Awardee in Music/Sound, and United States Artists Ford Fellow. 

ABOUT THE HOST

Patricio Ferrari (polyglot poet, translator, editor) is an Argentine-Italian whose journey across continents and languages began at sixteen. He earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Lisbon and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, where he transcribed selections of Fernando Pessoa’s unpublished English poetry. In 2025, he was awarded the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of Elsehere—a multilingual trilogy exploring how each language’s sounds, structures, and meanings shape identity. Ferrari calls this heterophony: the embodiment of another self through an adopted tongue. His translations for New Directions include works by Pessoa and Alejandra Pizarnik. He teaches in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College. 

BOOKS AND MORE

If you have a NYPL library card, you can borrow books related this event with our e-reader app SimplyE, available for iOS and Android devices.

Don't have a New York Public Library card? Get one here!

ACCESSIBILITY

In-Person

• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Online

• Live captioning will be provided.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org.

CONNECT

For general questions, please email adultprogramming@nypl.org.

Please submit all press inquiries at least 48 hours before the event: email press@nypl.org.