What Is It Too Late For? – A reading series in late-shops
[how \ long is the letter i]
With Yessica Klein, Inna Krasnoper, Dinara Rasuleva
Moderated by Katarina Gotic Damiani
What do poetic experiments and migration have in common? Can a mother tongue be forgotten? Be rewritten? What happens when we write in borrowed languages? In dominant tongues? What is lost and what is preserved in (self)translation? Can a compound language become a kind of homeland?
Curated by the collective OPEN Späti, What Is It Too Late For? is a summer reading series that transforms Berlin Spätis into spaces for poetic exchange and collective reflection. Over four months, writers whose work is shaped by migration gather with audiences, passersby, and late-shop regulars to explore questions that may have no clear answers. The series offers a multifaceted inquiry into how migration leaves its traces on language, writing, and belonging—approaching language not simply as a means of expression, but as a material to be moved, questioned, and rewritten.
In the second gathering of the series, we meet at Späti's Backshop to explore transformations in language and form, the political stakes of linguistic experimentation, and how subversive practices challenge both literary conventions and broader systems of power.
Entry is free, drinks and snacks späti-priced!
Yessica Klein is a Brazilian writer with an MA from Kingston University in London (UK), based in Berlin, Germany. She was shortlisted for the 2023 White Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and the 2017 Jane Martin Poetry Prize. Yessica’s work appears in Banshee Lit, The Moth, Wet Grain Poetry, 3:AM, Magnum Photos, and more. She runs a newsletter called That Poetry Thing, which focuses on writers’ desks and creative habits. She’s also working on her first novel.
Inna Krasnoper is a poet and artist born in Ufa (Bashqortostan) and based in Berlin. She graduated from the Chto Delat Collective School of Engaged Art in Saint Petersburg and holds a BA in Dance, Context, Choreography from University of the Arts in Berlin. Her Russophone poetry collections include Нитки торчат (Loose Threads), published by the Voznesensky Center, and Дорогой человек (Dear Person), published by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Her multilingual poetry has appeared in her chapbooks Over Sight (Eulalia Books) and Sealed (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press), as well as in Annulet, Ghost Proposal, Mosaik, SAND, and stadtsprachen magazin. Krasnoper’s first English-language poetry collection dis tanz was published by Veliz Books in 2025.
Dinara Rasuleva (she/they) is a poet_ess based in Berlin and born in Kazan, Tatarstan. Dinara writes in Tatar, Russian, English and German — languages she uses everyday. Dinara’s poetry was described and analysed as decolonial and feminist writing, as expressionist poetry and performance poetry. In 2020 Dinara started a feminist writing laboratory for russian-speaking immigrant FLINTA community. In 2022 their first book of poems Su was published by Babel publishing house. Since 2022 Dinara started the Lostlingual project, an investigation of the loss of her native Tatar language through translingual abstract poetry. In 2023 in collaboration with Berlin library Totschka Dinara started TEL:L laboratories: writing in native forgotten or stolen languages. Dinara does workshops on this topic for decolonial conferences and different institutions, including Goethe Institute, n_ost, belarusian writing school Rasciajenne, feminist translocalities, as well as performed and collaborated for Freie Universitat, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, ZoIS, Room to Bloom and others.
Katarina Gotic Damiani is (mostly) a Bosnian (mostly) poet. She is the author of two poetry collections, we need a breathing tongue between (kith books, 2024) and leerlauf (forthcoming, 2025), as well as several visual and performance pieces, all rooted in language. Katarina has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including the Work Stipend for Non-German Literature, the Research Scholarship for Translators, and the Project and Reading Series Funding awarded by the Berlin Senate. She has exhibited, performed, and read across Bosnia and Germany. Katarina is currently co-curating a Späti-based reading series centring on migration (but you already know that), and working on an “associative translation” of Paul Celan’s Atemwende into her mother tongue(s). She lives in Berlin.
Right next to a student dorm and the Anti-War Museum, Späti's Backshop is a popular hangout and meeting spot for students and locals alike. With its new name, "Backshop", it nods to fresh ideas and stories being "baked" here daily, as well as those that remind us not to forget. A place to enjoy literary evenings in a great atmosphere and dive into some deep, contemplative conversations.
The reading series is funded by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Social Cohesion.
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