AWP Offsite: Glossing the Margins—A Bi-lingual Arabic-English Poetry Reading

AWP Offsite: Glossing the Margins—A Bi-lingual Arabic-English Poetry Reading

Friday Mar 10 2023 7:00pm – 8:00pm

Join us for an evening of poetry in which the borders between languages fall away and only poetry remains. Featuring poets Deema Shehabi, Fady Joudah, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Lubna Safi, and Zeina Hashem Beck.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She is the translator and curator of the Poems from Palestine series at the Baffler magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, for her book Something About Living (U of Akron Press, 2024). Her second book of poems, Kaan & Her Sisters is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July, 2023.

Fady Joudah has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Arab American Book Award, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received the Northern California Book Award’s NCBR Recognition Award. She is also co-author of Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and the winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet and the author of, most recently, O, named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s the co-creator and co-host of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry produced by Sowt.

Lubna Safi is a poet, writer, and graduate student residing in California. Her poems and essays have been published in Guernica, The Journal, MIZNA, and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, Your Blue and the Quiet Lament won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry and is published by Texas Tech University Press