Poetry@Tech - Spring Immigrant / Refugee Poetry Reading

Poetry@Tech - Spring Immigrant / Refugee Poetry Reading

Thursday, Feb 20, 2020 7:30 PM

Location:
Kress Auditorium at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Paper Making
500 10th Street, NW, Atlanta, GA, 30309

Poetry@Tech presents its Spring Immigrant / Refugee Poetry Reading featuring Kwame Dawes, Javier Zamora, Dunya Mikhail, and Mahtem Shiferraw.

This event is free and open to the public. A Cappella Books will be selling a selection of the authors' books at the venue.

About the Poets:

Kwame Dawes has authored 35 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays, including, most recently, "Bivouac" (Akashic Books, 2019) and "City of Bones: A Testament" (Northwestern, 2017). "Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), co-written with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He is a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and Yaddo. Zamora’s poems appear in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. "Unaccompanied" (Copper Canyon, 2017) is his first collection.

Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and came to the United States in 1996. Her books include "In Her Feminine Sign" (2019); "The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq" (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Literature in Translation; "The Iraqi Nights," "Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea;" and "The War Works Hard." She also edited a pamphlet of Iraqi poetry titled "15 Iraqi Poets." Her honors include the Kresge Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. "The War Works Hard" was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and named one of the New York Public Library’s Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005. She is the co-founder of Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture in Michigan. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.

Mahtem Shiferraw is a writer and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry collection, "Fuchsia" (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She divides her time between Los Angeles, California, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.