PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, with Daniela Naomi Molnar in conversation with Julie Carr

Please register for this free online program co-presented by New Lehrhaus. Note that it has been changed from an in-person event to a virtual one.

PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language.

By redacting words from the original document, Molnar created a book-length poem that breathes space and light into a text dense with hatred. She patiently uncovers the questions buried within the source text: What is the true nature of power, and how is it tied to a fear of the unknown? How can language, weaponized and eroded, also be a tool for healing? And how can silence help us reckon with history and shape the future?

Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet’s deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses, and posing new possibilities for a less deterministic, more spacious and peaceful world.

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn’s 1st/2nd Book Award. Her book-length poem “Memory of a Larger Mind” accompanies photographs by Julian Stettler in The Glacier Is a Being (Sturm & Drang, 2023). Her work is anthologized in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology and in the forthcoming second volume of The Ecopoetry Anthology. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2028) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves Press, 2026). Molnar lives in Portland, Oregon and in the high deserts of the North American West.

Julie Carr is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She is the author of more than thirteen books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and Underscore (Omnidawn, 2024).

This program is made possible by Anne Germanacos.