Nathalie Khankan, Saretta Morgan, and Sarah Riggs, at Medicine for Nightmares

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

Join us for this in-person event in San Francisco's Mission district, with poets Nathalie Khankan, Saretta Morgan, and Sarah Riggs, reading their work then engaging in conversation with one another and the audience. 

• Please note: proof of vaccination and mask are required in order to attend in person.

Bios

Nathalie Khankan is the author of QUIET ORIENT RIOT published by Omnidawn, recipient of the 2021 California Book Award in poetry. Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, she was founding director of The Danish House in Palestine, and is now a lecturer, teaching Arabic language and literature, in the Middle East Languages and Cultures Department at UC Berkeley. Straddling Syrian, Finnish, Danish, and Palestinian homes and hemispheres, she now lives in San Francisco.

Saretta Morgan is a writer and artist. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she teaches Creative Writing at Arizona State University and contributes to the humanitarian aid efforts of No More Deaths Phoenix. She is the author of the chapbooks room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017) and Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). Currently her work addresses Black migration to the United States Southwest and its relationship to contemporary migration and border politics. Saretta holds degrees in writing from Columbia University and Pratt Institute. Most recently she has received grants and fellowships from Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is at work on Alt-Nature, her first full-length collection. 

Sarah Riggs is a poet, author most recently of a collection of letter poems, The Nerve Epistle (Roof Books, 2021, New York) and of Murmurations (Apic, 2021, Algeria) a bilingual book composed of parts of her two Chax Press Books, her first collection Waterwork and her political Eavesdrop, translated into French by Jérémy Robert with Marie Borel. Riggs received a 1913 Poetry Prize for her poetry book Pomme & Granite, as well as a Griffin International Poetry Prize with Etel Adnan for Adnan’s Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), which Riggs translated from the French. Riggs’ drawings, paintings and films have shown internationally, including in France and the U.S., where she has lived, in Montreal where her mother is from, and in Morocco, where her life partner Omar Berrada is from. Together in 2004, Riggs and Berrada founded Tamaas, which means “contact” in Arabic, an international arts organization with a focus on earth arts justice which runs an annual poetry translation seminar and publication, as well as the podcast Invitation to the Species,  projects through art, dance, and poetry, and is currently producing Alystyre Julian’s film Outrider on and with poet and performer Anne Waldman. Find out more at tamaas.org and at sarahriggs.org