Random Acts of Poetry: Readings by Jay Rogoff, Hajar Hussaini and Barbara Ungar

Join the Ballston Spa Committee on the Arts and SCHC at Brookside Museum for the Random Acts of Poetry Performance Reading.

Jay Rogoff has published seven books of poetry, most recently Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, from LSU Press. His essay collection, Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods, also from LSU, won the Lewis P. Simpson Award for outstanding literary criticism. His work has appeared in many journals, including AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Salmagundi, and The Southern Review. As Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate for 2026 and 2027, he has organized area readings and workshops for the Laureate Poetry Series and the Poet Laureate Project.

Hajar Hussaini is a poet and translator. She is the author of Disbound: Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2022). She has also translated Death and His Brother: A Novel by Khosraw Mani (Syracuse University Press, 2027), which won a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and Wounded Vita Nuda: Poems by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2027), which won the 2025 Mo Habib Translation Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Barbara Ungar is the author of six books and three chapbooks, most recently After Naming the Animals (The Word Works, 2024). Honors include the Snyder Publication Prize, Gival Poetry Prize, and being named to Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books of 2015 and 2019. She has published poems in Scientific American, Rattle, Salmagundi, and many other journals. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Bulgarian. Professor emerita from the College of Saint Rose, she lives in Saratoga Springs.