Event

Among the questions being posed by these writers is this one: When the entire world becomes remnants and memories of a lost homeland, how does one reconstruct the self and its language(s) in poetry? Join us for a poetry reading by two Palestinian poets of the diaspora, Olivia Elias and Ahmad Almallah, who write in French and English respectively. They will be joined by translators Sarah Riggs (to English) and Huda Fakhreddine (to Arabic) to read Palestine across languages and translation. This event is part of a campus-wide literature festival, Palestine Writes.

AHMAD ALMALLAH is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems, Bitter English, was published in 2019 in the Phoenix Poets series from the University of Chicago Press. Some of his poems and other writing have appeared in Jacket2, Apiary, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Great River Review, Kenyon Review, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry. He is currently an artist in residence in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His second collection, Border Wisdom, is forthcoming in fall 2023.

Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, OLIVIA ELIAS writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montreal-Canada, before moving to France. With Chaos, Crossing, published in November 2022 by World Poetry Books in a translation by Kareem James Abu Zeid, she made her English-language debut. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in anthologies and numerous journals, like World Literature Today, Asymptote, Poetry Daily, Plume, Poetry London, Arablit, Circulo de Poesia, Al-Araby All- Jedeed , and, in France, Apulee, Poezibao, Phoenix. …A special edition chapbook of her long poem, Your name, Palestine, in a translation by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, is forthcoming from World Poetry in September 2023.

HUDA FAKHREDDINE is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2021). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, and Asymptote, among others. Her book of creative non-fiction titled زمن صغير تحت شمس ثانية (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.

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, most recently, Etel Adnan’s TIME (Nightboat, 2019), recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020.

For further details, see the Kelly Writers House calendar.