Event in person canceled but maintained on zoom, find link at bottom of page.
Join us to celebrate the publication of Your Name, Palestine by Olivia Elias, translated into English by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert, and printed as a limited edition chapbook with drawings by Basil King. The event features readings by Elias and her translators, as well as Mirene Arsanios, and musical performances by Jenny Luna and Adam Good.
Copies of Your Name, Palestine as well as Olivia Elias's Chaos, Crossing (tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, World Poetry, 2022) will be available for sale and signature at the event.
This event co-presented with Tamaas/World Poetry Books
A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until the age of sixteen in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montreal, Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees, and human suffering. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, has appeared in anthologies and numerous journals, including Arablit, Al Araby-Al-Jedeed, Asymptote Journal, Circulo de Poesía, Plume Poetry, Nayagua, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Barcelona Review, The Washington Square Review, and World Literature Today, and, in France, Apulée, Poezibao, Poésie/première, and Phoenix. In 2022, she published her first book in English translation, Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and more recently, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday nights reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017-19. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Sarah Riggs is a poet, activist, and co-founder of Tamaas. She is the author of seven books of poetry in English, most recently: Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015), Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle (Roof Books, 2021). She has translated and co-translated six books of contemporary French poetry into English, including Etel Adnan's TIME (Nightboat, 2019), recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020.
Jérémy Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Chibuihe Obi Achimba’s poem, “a sonnet: a slaughter field,” which was published on Poezibao’s website, and Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes.
Jenny Luna is a musician whose interests span a wide array of musical genres. She grew up listening to the music of her bilingual cultural background: Bachata, Merengue, and Mariachi, and she has studied both classical and jazz vocal styles. She has also studied classical piano and Middle Eastern hand percussion. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Adam Good is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music in Boston. With a foundation in jazz guitar, his interest in the music of Eastern Europe and Turkey began in the mid-90s. His talent on tambura, Turkish ud, guitar, and knowledge of Turkish makam have made Adam a fixture of New York’s Balkan and Middle Eastern music scenes. He plays regularly with the ensembles Dolunay and Pontic Firebird, and with clarinet master Souren Baronian’s ensemble Taksim. His self-released CD, entitled Dances of Macedonia and the Balkans, features several of his folk compositions alongside familiar melodies. Adam lives in Brooklyn and regularly teaches in the New York City area.
This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Date
Friday September 29
Doors open at 7pm, reading starts at 7:15pm
Location
Join the zoom event here