Poetry, hip hop at Herndon

• By Lauren Shows
• Published: February 26, 2026

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A winter heating issue at Antioch College has prompted a venue change — but not a pause — for two upcoming events sponsored by Mad River Theater Works.

A poetry event on Thursday, Feb. 20, and a hip-hop performance on Friday, Feb. 21, originally slated for the Foundry Theater, will now be held at the Herndon Gallery after a boiler malfunction and subsequent water damage closed the Foundry, as well as the Wellness Center and the Art and Science Building.

Via the college’s website last week, Antioch officials said replacement parts for the failed boiler have arrived and been installed, but the Foundry remains closed while damage from frozen and burst geothermal lines is assessed. The move comes with reduced capacity; advance ticket registration is strongly encouraged. Parking for the events is available behind the Olive Kettering Library.

The Wellness Center reopened Wednesday, Feb. 11, with staff noting that the pool and spa are closed until water can be returned to an appropriate temperature.

Full information on the closures and updates are being posted online at antiochcollege.edu.

Speaker series: Ross Gay, janan alexandra

The first of the two events, set for Friday, Feb. 20, will feature a joint reading and conversation from poets Ross Gay and janan alexandra as part of a continuing speaker series.

Mad River Theater Works Managing Director Chris Westhoff said the idea for the event began with Gay, a well-known contemporary poet and essayist whose work he felt would resonate strongly with a local audience.

“He’s very attuned to people’s struggles in all different ways, but his focus, at least in his work, remains in areas of joy and what he calls ‘delight,’” he said.

Westhoff described the evening as a shared reading, noting that Gay and alexandra are colleagues who know each other well and who both teach writing at Indiana University. Gay, he said, suggested inviting alexandra to join him for the inaugural event.

alexandra, who spoke with the News this week, is both a poet and a self-described “burgeoning writer of nonfiction,” and said Gay’s invitation for her to co-headline the event is an extension of a professional and personal relationship shaped by magnanimity.

“He’s a very generous person and friend and mentor in my life,” she said. “He often brings people into things.”

alexandra’s debut poetry collection “come from” was published last year, and she said she often writes from a place of close observation of her own inner life, her body and the world around her — her “experience of being alive.”

“It’s beautiful to take notice — to notice what moves us, to be interested in how our mind works,” she said.

Taking notice, she said, extends outward to others as well, especially at a time when reliance on technology can create distance between people.

“Increasingly, as you disconnect — you know, have AI write your emails — people are very removed from their bodies, the wisdom and knowledge in their bodies and feeling,” she said. “I believe in the primacy of feeling.”

As an educator who has taught creative writing in a variety of settings, alexandra brings a similar philosophy to the classroom, where she said she aims to help folks be curious and connect with themselves and each other as creative beings — and to belay some of the anxiety that can sometimes be attached to the practice of writing.

“Especially in school settings, there’s so much fear connected to reading and writing and getting it right, spelling correctly, but we all use language all the time,” she said. “You know how to woo your crush via text message; you’re using the same skills in writing.”

Language — its limits, its gifts, its eccentricities, its cultural consequence — is a central theme in much of the work that populates alexandra’s book “come from,” which braids English with Arabic to explore home and family. Within the poems, alexandra’s Lebanese-American identity is reflected in exploration of both belonging and disconnection, particularly around her relationship to the Arabic language.

In “Invocation,” the opening work of “come from,” alexandra writes about calling her mother to ask for an Arabic word she’s forgotten, for which there is no English equivalent. She ends the poem by wondering:

when i can
no longer call,
what else
will have no name?

“I write in English,” alexandra said, “but I started experimenting with having a little bit of Arabic on the page, or at least transliterated Arabic as an expression of parts of my identity and things that don’t exist in English but do exist in Arabic.”

That experimentation, she said, was guided in part by formal study of Arabic while in graduate school, and in part by seeing other writers engage in “language retrieval work,” which she described as “invoking the importance of language that has been in some way lost” through “immigration or dislocation or war or colonialism.”

“I feel this very deep connection to the language,” she said. “But I’m not always legible in Arabic to other people, my identity as Arabic is questioned because I’m not fluent … and [language is] a big part of how people determine belonging. … I think some of that playing on the page and moving between voices is my own intuitive experiment in being.”

Playing on the page is a physical exercise for alexandra’s work, at least in its initial stages, as she said she writes longhand daily before later transcribing and shaping her work. Writing in this way, she said, feels like a “sanctuary,” away from the many assorted tasks that proximity to a computer might demand.

“I think writing is a very embodied practice; people think of it as happening in your head, but there’s a brain-hand connection, and writing by hand helps me find out what I’m thinking about and what I’m feeling,” she said. “My attention’s not pulled in five directions — and there’s just the pleasure of a pen, feeling that juicy connection to a page, that feels good.”

As for what she will read on Feb. 20, alexandra said she is still deciding. She often adjusts her selections based on the room, the audience and the moment. No matter what she reads, she said she hopes the audience will walk away “being filled up with good stuff.”

“Connection, care — anything that helps people build their capacity for being alive and continuing to work hard to survive and help other people survive,” she said. “I hope it’s fortifying.”

It’s a hope, she said, that’s rooted in the act of gathering during difficult times; she acknowledged that, against all odds, humans have “survived so much unspeakable brutality.” With that in mind, being together around art, she said, doesn’t mean we have to evade the painful or unresolved elements of living.

“It’s not that we’re turning away from what is devastating,” she said. “What is devastating is with us as well.”

In that sense, she said, joy and grief are not opposites, and people connecting with and caring for each other is a kind of shared endurance.

“The joy is not that we’re talking about happy things,” she said. “It’s that we’re together.”

“No More Knocking”

The following night, Friday, Feb. 21, Mad River Theater Works will present “No More Knocking,” a hip-hop performance featuring well-known area artist Tronee Threat, along with Chris., Blakk Sun and 11-year-old break dancer Kai the Action Kid.

Westhoff said the idea for the project grew directly out of a performance he heard last summer at the former community gathering space on Short Street, where Tronee Threat, Chris. and Blakk Sun performed together.

“They were both on Tron’s Short Street set last summer, and I so dug it,” Westhoff said. “It was so good. It was so life-affirming. It was so forward-thinking.”

Westhoff said he was drawn to the energy of the performances, but also to the substance of the words beneath the music.

“Sometimes hip hop is really great because the energy and the spirit is great, and the sound of it is big and full, and it’s all happening, but the content can be anything,” he said. “But with their set, there wasn’t a sentiment that didn’t mean something resonant.”

After that performance, Westhoff told Tron he wanted to find a way to bring the work into an indoor setting, and he said Tron was on board from the get-go. Thus was born “No More Knocking” — a title, Westhoff said, that communicates the show’s underlying idea: a refusal to wait for permission from entrenched systems.

“The concept is that waiting for someone to open the door for you, when that someone is the establishment, isn’t working,” he said. “So we’re not going to wait.”

Kai the Action Kid, a competitive break dancer from Columbus, will serve as a connective presence throughout the evening.

“I think his dancing is the main way he communicates to us,” Westhoff said, describing the young performer as an interlocutor between the other artists during the show.

In the tradition of some of Mad River Theater Works’ past devised performances, Westhoff said “No More Knocking” is coming together organically, with room for adjustment up until the doors open at the Herndon.

“We have the show in order,” he said. “But the way in which it comes together — all the elements will be there, and then it’ll be my job the day of to put it together. We’re really excited.”

janan alexandra and Ross Gay will read and speak Friday, Feb. 20, 7–9 p.m. “No More Knocking” will debut Saturday, Feb. 21, 7:30–9 p.m. Both events will be held in the Herndon Gallery; for more information, and to purchase tickets in advance, go to http://www.antiochcollege.edu/foundry-theater.

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