This month we celebrate Middle Eastern Poetry with poets
Ahmad Almallah, Huda J. Fakhreddine, Fatemeh Shams, and host Charles S. Carr, will discuss the importance of Middle Eastern Poetry. They will also read selections from their poetry.
Ahmad Almallah’s first book of poems Bitter English will be out this September in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press.
He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship.
Some of his poems appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugeesand forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review.
He holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Literature from IUB and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is Assistant Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition: From Modernists to Muhdathūn and co- translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning.
Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Middle Eastern Literatures.
She is currently completing a book project titled, The Edge of Poetry: The Arabic Prose Poem as Theory and Practice.
Fatemeh Shams’s third bilingual book of poems, When They Broke Down the Door was published by the Mage Publisher in Washington in 2016 and won the 2017 Latifeh Yarshater annual book award. Her first two collections were published in Persian.
She received Jaleh Esfahani poetry award as the best young Persian poet in 2012. Some of her poems appeared in the Michigan Quarterly, Jacket 2, Penn Sound, Exiled Writers Magazine, Iran’s Writers Association in Exile, Poetry Foundation, PBS, Life and Legends, St. Hilda’s Feminist Salon, and MPT Magazine.
Her forthcoming poems will appear in the World Literature Today, New Divan from the Ginko Publisher and Mirror of My Heart: 1000 Years of Persian Women Poetry in 2019.
Fatemeh Shams holds a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University and currently serves as the assistant professor of Modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Watch on Comcast Xfinity 66/ 966HD/ 967, Verizon FIOS 29/30 in Philadelphia, Roku, FB Live, and PhillyCAM Livestream everywhere
Free and open to the public. Live Studio Audience should arrive no later than 6 pm
Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Readings Series on PhillyCAM
There are over 50 organizations that promote poetry in the Philadelphia area. They represent every poetry form, ethnic background, age, gender, and community. This series consists of a panel of guest poets and artists discussing the opportunities which their group or organization provides for poets in Philly as well as the themes that influence them. The program is broadcast live on the first Tuesday of each month. The program is free and open to everyone.
Co-Produced by
Moonstone Arts Center Office
110A S. 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107,
(215) 735-9600
www.moonstoneartscenter.org