#arabicwriters

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
   
• Masks are requested for those attending in person.

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, SF State.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third full-length poetry collection, O, was published by Penguin Books in July 2022. Her collection Louder than Hearts won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook prize, There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice selected by Carol Ann Duffy, and To Live in Autumn, winner of the 2013 Backwaters Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Educated in Arabic, English, and French, Zeina has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Zeina’s invented The Duet, a bilingual poetic form where English and Arabic exist separately and in relationship to each other. Her poem “Maqam” won Poetry Magazine’s 2017 Frederick Bock Prize. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina recently moved to California.

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American poet, editor and writing teacher in Santa Cruz, CA. Her debut book, Sister Tongue, won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (selected by Tracy K. Smith) and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press. She is a member and cofounder of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. Her poetry and prose appears in Poets.org (Poem-a-Day), Pedestal Magazine, Grist Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Tahoma Literary Review,Tupelo Quarterly, phren-z.org, and several anthologies (including, most recently, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora, My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices of the Iranian Diaspora and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me). She is a member of the Community of Writers, and taught Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1997-2018.

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

Presented by The Poetry Center in conjunction with the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series

RSVP TO ATTEND IN PERSON

Please join us for The Poetry Center's memorial tribute to our beloved friend and teacher, Etel Adnan. We'll gather in person, with six guest artists, poets and writers, both those who knew Etel personally and others influenced by her life and work. Audience can attend either in person (limited to 50, RSVP required) or watch via live-stream. Featured participants: Zaina Alsous, David Buuck, Naz Cuguoğlu, Fady Joudah, Stefania Pandolfo, and Camille Roy. Presented in conjunction with the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series.

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

Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, in Paris, following World War II. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California. 

In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the France-Pays Arabes award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of war literature. 

In 1977, Adnan, together with her life-partner, Simone Fattal, artist and publisher of The Post-Apollo Press, re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris.

Some twenty books of her poetry, fiction, and essays were published during Adnan's lifetime, garnering multiple awards, including the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2020, for Time (shared with translator Sarah Riggs). In 2014, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, in two large volumes edited by Brandon Shimoda and Thom Donovan, was published by Nightboat Books. That year, she was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honor.

In the later years of her life, Etel Adnan was embraced internationally by the art world, with numerous exhibitions of her paintings, work for textiles, prints, and unique hand-painted books, many interviews and features in international art media, and multiple catalogs and monographs devoted to her art. The exhibition "Etel Adnan: Light's New Measure" gathered her work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in winter 2021–22.
(Adapted, with additions, from the biography at eteladnan.com)

Photo: Etel Adnan by Norma Cole, 19 June 2011, at Irving Petlin exhibition, Éspace topographie de l'art, Paris.

Etel Adnan, interview with Lisa Robertson, BOMB, April 1, 2014

Etel Adnan at home, talking on painting and writing with Judith Benhamou-Huet

Etel Adnan, New York Times obituary, by Nana Asfour, Nov 14, 2021

Etel Adnan, ArtNews obituary, by Tessa Solomon, Nov 15, 2021

The Art World's Tainted Love for "Discovering" Artists: the Case of Etel Adnan, by Naz Cuguoğlu, Hyperallergic, March 6, 2022

The Mountain at the Center: Reflections on Etel Adnan, Small Press Traffic, Feb. 27, 2022

Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics

Our first event back in The Poetry Center since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Hear new work from, and conversation with, fellow Bay Area poets and SF State alums Keith Donnell Jr. and Antony Fangary. 

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Keith Donnell Jr., originally from Philly, is a Bay Area poet and book editor. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State and his MA in English from the University of Southern California. He was the 2017-2018 Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review and has taught in SFSU’s Creative Writing Department. Keith’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series and the 2019 edition of Best American Non-required Reading. He lives in Hayward, CA with his wife, Alivia, and two cats, Ember and Mika. His first poetry collection, The Move, is new this Fall 2021 from Nomadic Press. More at keithdonnelljr.com

Antony Fangary is a Coptic-American poet, educator, and artist living in San Francisco. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Oakland Review, New American Writing, Interim, The Sycamore Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. His paintings have been featured in art shows around San Francisco and Los Angeles. His chapbook, HARAM, was published by Etched Press in 2019. Antony was Honorable Mention of the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Prize, finalist for the 2019 Wabash Poetry Prize, runner-up for the 2020 Test Site Poetry Series Book Prize, and nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. His work has received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. 

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center

Watch the unedited video at YouTube before the finished program gets posted at Poetry Center Digital Archive

With emcee, Brent Awa Jensen

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

This remote-access event starts promptly at 7:00 pm Pacific Time and is free and open to the public. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel, and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu

The Poetry Center is delighted to welcome poets Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, appearing from Brooklyn, New York. They will be reading from their work, then talking with each other, joined by emcee Brent Awa Jensen, and with questions from the audience.

• First, we had to learn each other’s languages.
  This was the longest, most loving trial.
  Then we undid our own.
  —Youmna Chlala, from The Paper Camera
• "This is a 'camera' work where the film keeps moving along people who're running from city to city, continent to continent, directed by "a young girl / [who] sticks her tongue / out at a gun." Covering, and uncovering Lebanon, she extracts remarkable poetry from a continuously exploding war."—Etel Adnan

Youmna Chlala is an artist and writer born in Beirut and based in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press, 2019), with writing appearing in BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA, and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. As an artist, she has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dubai Art Projects, Hessel Museum of Art and MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, 7th LIAF Biennial in Norway, and 11th Performa Biennial. She is co-editing a new series for Coffee House Press entitled Spatial Species and is a Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing Departments at the Pratt Institute.

• If all the dead exist in the underworld, does the underworld occur outside of time, what does that mean for your father, through what magic will you locate your father who has only just arrived, has always only just departed, only just deported, did you don a suit and loiter on the highway your hands gripping a giant gilt-framed photograph of him and what questions did you interview at all who passed those vampires and angels you encountered, can you state for the record the moan you heard the ghosts emit across the nation-state,,, wuaahh buu,,, ...
  —Ken Chen, from "Locate"

Ken Chen was a 2019–2020 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where he worked on his next book Death Star. The book follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. He was the 2009 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his book Juvenilia, selected by Louise Glück. Chen served as the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008 to 2019 and co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. A graduate of Yale Law School, he successfully defended the asylum application of an undocumented Muslim high school student from Guinea detained by Homeland Security.

Featured:

"Igniting the Relational: Youmna Chlala Interviewed by Mónica de la Torre," at BOMB, Jan 21, 2021

Ken Chen, Writing hallucinogenic hermetica about colonialism