Postponed due to COVID-19 precautions. New date coming soon.
In the Shadow of Others: Three Poets on What Helps Them Live & Work
What helps writers navigate life's turbulent waters and find our creativity? Ahmad Almallah, Olga Livshin, and Jenna Le - three poets from three different backgrounds - read from their works and comment on this question with insights about cooking, art, and mother culture/s.
When asked what shapes him, Ahmad Almallah says: "I could be thinking of a poet, a writer or an artist as a creator... but also of a cook, a carpenter or laborer. Essentially I know that the most important creator in my life is my mother. She taught me how to cook and from that I learned how to derive meaning from that act of making." Almallah's book of poems Bitter English was published this fall by 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 Refugees and forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review. He holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Literature from IUB and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College.
Olga Livshin is in dialogue with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whom Ilya Kaminsky calls "the great poetic mother" in his preface to Livshin's 2019 book of poems and translations A Life Replaced (Poets & Traitors Press). Her poems have been recognized by the CALYX Journal's Lois Cranston Memorial Prize and the Cambridge Sidewalk Poetry Project. Essays, poems, and translations appear in The Kenyon Review, Jacket, and other journals, and are widely published. The poet and filmmaker Mohsen Emadi translated her work into Persian and included it in The Persian Anthology of World Poetry. She holds a BA / BS from Boston University and a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature from Northwestern.
Jenna Le's inspirations include poets ranging from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Guillaume Apollinaire, singers from Sylvie Vartan to Kris Kristofferson, and the visual artists who inspire her ekphrastic poetry such as Vincent Van Gogh and Kenojuak Ashevak. She is the author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), which won 2nd Place in the Elgin Awards. and Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011). Le was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear or are forthcoming from AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Rattle, and West Branch. She has a B.A. in math and an M.D. and lives and works in NYC. Her website is jennalewriting.com.