#iraniandiaspora

• 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.

Join us online for a remote-access Saturday afternoon (3:00 pm Pacific) reading with California poets/translators Armen Davoudian, Farnaz Fatemi, Gary Gach, Zara Houshmand, Persis Karim, Mojdeh Marashi, and Sholeh Wolpé, each contributors to the new anthology, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, edited by Christopher Nelson; introduced by Kaveh Bassiri (Green Linden Press, 2021).

Co-presented with the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and Diaspora Arts Connection.

The anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others.

Purchase the 364-page book here. Image, detail from cover art [untitled] by Golnaz Fathi.

• Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora offers a profoundly satisfying journey into the poetic canon of my homeland—an anthology with an ambition, expanse, depth, and diversity that truly earns its essential tag. So many poets I was hoping would be in here are here, from contemporary icons to new luminaries, plus I got to explore several poets I had never before read. Everyone from students of poetry to masters of the form should take this ride through the soul and psyche of Iran, which endures no matter where the border, beyond whatever the boundary!

  —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

Bios

Zara Houshmand is an Iranian American writer whose work bridges cultural divides and includes poetry, theatre, memoir, and literary translation. Her most recent book is Moon and Sun (2020), translations of Rumi’s rubaiyat. More here. 

Armen Davoudian is the author of Swan Song, which won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and lives in California, where he is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

Award-winning poet, artist, and literary translator Sholeh Wolpé was born in Iran and grew up in Trinidad and the U.K. before settling in the United States. She earned an MA in radio, television, and film from Northwestern University, as well as a master of health sciences degree from Johns Hopkins University. Wolpé is the author of the chapbook The Outsider (2018) and several collections of poetry.

Mojdeh Marashi is a designer, artist, writer, and translator. Mojdeh was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. She now lives and works in Palo Alto, California where she works as the Managing Director at Blurred Whisper, an Idea and Design studio in Palo Alto, California, which Mojdeh co-founded in 2002. Mojdeh studied Art at California College of Arts (CCA) and later at San Francisco State University where she earned her Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts and a second M.A. in Creative Writing.

Gary Gach is an American author, translator, editor, teacher and poet living on Russian Hill, San Francisco. His work has been translated into several languages, and has appeared in several anthologies and numerous periodicals. He serves on the International Advisory Panel of the Buddhist Channel, a Malaysian Buddhist news website. He currently hosts Haiku Corner for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Farnaz Fatemi is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and poetry-related events in Santa Cruz County. Her poems and lyric essays have recently appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, SWWIM Daily, Grist Journal and several anthologies. Her book, Sister Tongue, won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (selected by Tracy K. Smith) and is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Kent State University Press.

Persis Karim is a poet, editor and professor of Comparative & World Literature at San Francisco State University. Her poetry has been published in Reed Magazine, The Raven's Perch, The New York Times, The Broken Spine and other publications. She is also the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University.

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

Join us for an evening set of readings with poets Wang Ping and Ava Koohbor at the exciting new collectively run SF Mission-based venue, Medicine for Nightmares (formerly Alley Cat Bookshop).

Poet, novelist and artist Wang Ping was born in 1957 in Shanghai, China. She earned a BA in English from Beijing University before immigrating to the United States in 1985. Ping earned an MA in English from Long Island University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is the author of over 12 books of poetry, prose, and translation, most recently the poetry collection My Name is Immigrant (Hanging Loose, 2020) and the memoir Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi (University of Georgia, 2018), winner of the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award (2017). Wang's work is deeply rooted in her Chinese ancestry and identity and addresses the complexities of language, culture, and gender. She has also been featured in several multi-media solo exhibitions, including “We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers,” a one-month exhibition that brought 100 artists from the Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers to celebrate water (Soap Factory, 2014), and collaborated with filmmakers and composers on multiple projects. Minnesota Poet Laureate for 2021-2023, Wang is the founder of the Kinship of Rivers Project at Macalester College, where she taught creative writing as a Professor of English for 21 years and is now a Professor Emerita. More at wangping.com

Ava Koohbor is a poet, visual, and sound artist. Her poems have appeared in various publications as well the chapbooks Triangle Squared (Bootstrap Press) and Sinusoidal Forms (Lew Gallery), and the full-length collection Death Under Construction (Ugly Duckling Presse/ Bird & Beckett Books). Her latest electronic music performance was broadcasted online in The Modular World Anniversary Series. Her latest assemblages (Eye of Noir), hosted by Colter Jacobson, were exhibited at Right Window Gallery. She believes that each artist is a medium to transfer the world of possibilities to what is. She is now pursuing an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College.

Photo credit: Wang Ping, Kinship of Rivers Project at the Yangtse River, by Fritz Vandover

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

(415) 338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center and Medicine for Nightmares