Kitchen Table Reading

Join us for an evening of readings by members of Kitchen Table, a Berlin-based writing group named in homage to the 1980s US feminist women-of-colour press. Founded in 2022 by critic and historian of science Edna Bonhomme, the group meets monthly to read, write, share resources, support one another, and reflect — often with joy and humour — on what it means to be a writer in difficult times. Working across genres, Kitchen Table members will share excerpts from works in progress and previously published pieces.  

Edna Bonhomme: Edna Bonhomme is a critic, journalist, and historian of science. She is a finalist for the 2026 Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. She earned a PhD in History from Princeton University. Bonhomme's essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her books include After Sex (2023), A History of the World in Six Plagues (2025), and Tending to Our Wounds (2026). She lives in Berlin.

Charmaine Li: Born in Toronto, Charmaine Li is a writer based in Berlin. She is interested in cultivating modes of storytelling and space-making that embrace ambiguity and move beyond dualistic frameworks. Guided by intuition and independent research, her projects have taken the form of texts, experimental publications, multimedia installations, and participatory readings for collective dream reflection. She helped establish ONEIRIC SPACE, a research project that examines how dreams intertwine with waking life.

Pia Koh: Pia Koh is a writer and editor from New York. After graduating from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature, she worked as a local politics reporter, a line cook, and a rare book archivist. She currently lives in Berlin, where she’s studying for a master’s degree in English Philology at Freie Universität and writing a novel about a profound hole. She serves as a fiction reader at ANMLY and her work has appeared in X-RAY Magazine, Whetstone Magazine and elsewhere.

Ishi Robinson: Ishi Robinson was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. A Canadian citizen, she has lived in Bern, Toronto, Rome, and London, and now lives in Berlin with her Czech husband. Her first published work was a short story in Jamaica’s national newspaper when she was eleven. At seventeen, she started a weekly column in The Jamaica Observer about teenage life in Kingston. She also wrote a weekly column on life as an expat in Rome for a now-defunct online magazine. She returned to fiction writing in Berlin, where she has published short stories in several online publications and in one anthology. Sweetness in the Skin is her first novel.

Pari Ludin: Pari Ludin is a writer, musician, and cultural worker of Afghan heritage. Born in Germany and raised in Canada, her practice spans over a decade of shaping arts and cultural programming across community spaces and beyond. Her writing has been featured by Women* Writing Berlin Lab as part of their Hair/Haare Anthology (April 2024), and she previously chronicled hidden musical gems for the Goethe-Institut’s Custom Cultures blog. Through words and melodies, she explores the resonance of memory, storytelling, and play.