OPENING READING:

Featuring Threa Almontaser, Danielle Badra, Banah el Ghadbanah, Carolyn Guinzio, and Mohja Kahf, with an opening mini-feature by Vasantha Sambamurti

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October 29, 2021

at 7:00 pm CDT via Zoom

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GENERATIVE WORKSHOP:

Contrapuntal Workshop: Creating Resistance via Collaboration and Conversation

with Danielle Badra

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October 30, 2021

at 1:00 pm CDT via Zoom

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GENERATIVE WORKSHOP:

Personas Unknown

with Jordan E. Franklin

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October 30, 2021

at 4:00 pm CDT via Zoom

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FINAL READING:

Featuring Kaveh Bassiri, Emily Rose Cole, Brody Parrish Craig, Jordan E. Franklin, and Khalisa Rae, with an opening mini-feature by David Donna

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October 30, 2021

at 7:00 pm CDT via Zoom

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ABOUT THE POETS

Threa Almontaser

Threa Almontaser is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press) selected by Harryette Mullen for the 2020 Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of awards from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright program, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA and TESOL certification from North Carolina State University.

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Danielle Badra

Danielle Badra received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse (forthcoming), BAHR, Mizna, Cincinnati Review, Duende, The Greensboro Review, Bad Pony, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Split This Rock, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021.

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Kaveh Bassiri

Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. He is the author of two chapbooks: 99 Names of Exile (2019), winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English (2020), winner of Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. His poetry has been published in the Best American Poetry 2020, Best New Poets 2020, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah. He is also the recipient of a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship from Arkansas Arts Council, and 2021-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His translations have appeared in The Common, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The Massachusetts Review.

 

Emily Rose Cole

Emily Rose Cole is the author of Thunderhead, a collection forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press, and Love & a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems in women's voices from Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2018, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati.

 

Brody Parrish Craig

Brody Parrish Craig is the author of Boyish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2021), the winner of the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook contest. They are the editor of Twang, an anthology of TGNC+ creatives from the south/midwest, which was awarded a 2018 Artists 360 Practicing Artist grant. Their poetry may be found online at Crab Fat Magazine, Hobart and Typo, among other places. Their first full length poetry collection will be published with Omnidawn in Fall 2024.

David Donna

David Donna's poems have appeared in Radar Poetry, The Shore, Ibbetson Street, and elsewhere. They live in Massachusetts, where they write code and poetry by turns.

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Banah el Ghadbanah

Banah el Ghadbanah (she/they/zhe) is a mermaid from Syria raised in the u.s south. Their poems can be found in Mizna, Poetry Northwest, the Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are the recipient of the Diverse Voices Prize from Dzanc Books and their first book, we are on this earth to be free, is forthcoming in June 2022. Zhe holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego where zhe studied Syrian women's creativity in revolution and siege.

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Jordan E. Franklin

Jordan E. Franklin is a poet from Brooklyn, NY. An alumna of Brooklyn College, she earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton where she served as a Turner Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize offered by the North American Review, and a finalist of both the 2018 Nightjar Review Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, when the signals come home, was selected as the winner of the 2020 Gatewood Prize and was published by Switchback Books in March 2021. Her poetry chapbook, boys in the electric age, was published by Tolsun Books in August 2021.

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Carolyn Guinzio

Carolyn Guinzio's most recent collection is A Vertigo Book (The Word Works, 2021), winner of The Tenth Gate Prize. Earlier collections include Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012), winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room Of Her Own Prize, and the visual poems Ozark Crows (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry and many other journals. Her short films have appeared at Poetry Film Live, Magma, Atticus Review and elsewhere.

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Mohja Kahf

Mohja Kahf, professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arkansas since 1995, is author of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Hagar Poems, E-mails from Scheherazad, My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit, and Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. Her writing has been translated to Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, German, and French. She has won the Pushcart Prize and the Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist award. Kahf competed in the 1999 National Poetry Slam on Team Ozarks alongside the late Brenda Moossy (an Arab American poet who established slam poetry in northwest Arkansas).

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Khalisa Rae

Khalisa Rae is an award-winning poet, activist, and journalist based in Durham, NC. She is the Gen Z Culture Editor at Blavity News and the author of debut collection Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat from Red Hen Press 2021. Her articles appear in Vogue, Autostraddle, Catapult, LitHub, Bitch Media, NBC-BLK, and others. Her power-packed poetry in Electric Lit, Pinch, Tishman Review, Frontier Poetry, Rust & Moth, PANK, HOBART, among countless others. Currently, she serves as Asst. Editor of Glass Poetry, co-founder of Think in Ink and the Women of Color Speak reading series. Her second collection, Unlearning Eden is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing in 2022.

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Vasantha Sambamurti

Vasantha Sambamurti is a poet, translator, and prose writer. They are pursuing an MFA at the University of Arkansas’ Program in Creative Writing and Translation, where they received the Carolyn F. Walton Cole and Lily Peter Fellowships in Poetry. She is a senior editor for Transition Magazine, founded in Uganda in 1961 by Rajat Neogy, now based at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Portland Review, the minnesota review, Cream City Review, The Hunger, & elsewhere.

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