SCHOLARSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT
The Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship for Communist Women Smokers provides students with the opportunity to attend six months of courses at Poetry Field School free of cost.
Leijia Beth Hanrahan, daughter of Nancy and Kip Hanrahan, was a revolutionary, historian, geographer, writer, poet, researcher, world traveler, translator, musician, internationalist, and a total fucking riot. As a child, Leijia built cities with milk cartons for high-rise apartment buildings, and other small boxes for different kinds of structures, all of which were covered with construction paper that was also used for windows, streets, and of course, the East River. In one of her last published essays, she wrote her bio: Leijia Hanrahan is a former right midfielder in New York. She completed her suicide on October 29, 2022.
As a writer, Leijia was completely present in her pieces, to which she brought a geographer’s vast lucidity, a polyglot’s wordplay, a communist’s verbal economy. In her essays Leijia told us what she knew. Her poetry tells us how she came to know. How knowledge revealed itself to her and her to it. It wanders through her city of milk cartons and paper. Daring and vulnerable. The softening of a hard discipline, retaining its edges.
We are blessed by this window to her interiority. The Poetry Field School was blessed. She was generous in the classroom, daring and welcoming. There’s some basic humor in describing an anti-capitalist as having enriched a space, but Leijia saw beyond that dead end. She saw a thought commons, she saw abundance, and showed us. A maxim: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Leijia danced about architecture.
Leijia’s life cannot be defined by any single thing, it is not defined by her death. Her death cannot be defined by any single thing, it is not defined by her life.
I object / to being torn up, / like a flower of the fields, / after a long day’s work.²
As a communist and a person in the world. Leijia was curious, committed, not afraid to put theory into action. Not afraid of not-knowing, and eager to stay-with-the-trouble if she believed in a project, regardless of its flaws. A ubiquitous descriptor is “genius” and absolutely Leijia was a genius. As generous as genius; generous with her genius, not a day went by without her explaining what a “commodity” actually is. Now we may never know.
Leijia was a traveler by any means necessary. She adopted a kitten and taught her how to poop in a towel so they could ride the rails together. Leijia translated and contextualized important, neglected, and misunderstood texts. Her intellectual projects disrespected the boundary between thought and action. She offered her whole body of scholarship to every collaboration because it never occurred to her to be withholding. She would remember what day of the week your appointment was on and ask how it went after. You could find her smoking and talking shit on the stoop with her beloved roommates. You could find her fighting for New Yorkers struggling to navigate housing access in a city designed to keep us frozen. ³
Leijia gave the most epic eyerolls in the Anthropocene. She gesticulated Jewishly. When Leijia died, New York disappeared before she could take her last breath.*
–Beck Levy
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You will hear thunder and remember me, / And think: she wanted storms.**
¹Galeano; ²Mayakovsky; ³Hanrahan; *Hanrahan; **Akhmatova