Distance, Memory, Longing: A Conversation with Four Kurdish-American Poets

Distance, Memory, Longing: A Conversation with Four Kurdish-American Poets

Saturday, January 22, 2022 - 12:00PM ET
Event Location: 
Virtual

This event will take place virtually on Zoom. Click the button above to register.

Join the Transnational Literature Series for an afternoon of poetry with Kurdish-American poets Hajjar Baban, Holly Mason Badra, Tracy Fuad, and Pınar Banu Yaşar.

Kurdish-American poets Hajjar Baban, Holly Mason Badra, Tracy Fuad, and Pınar Banu Yaşar come together for a reading and conversation.

About the poets:

Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. She is the author of the chapbooks Relative to Blood (Penmanship Books, 2018) and What I Know of the Mountains (Anhinga Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. She's a 2021 PD Soros Fellow and MFA in Poetry candidate at the University of Virginia. You can find her work at hajjarbaban.com.

Holly Mason Badra received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews appear in The Adroit Journal, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, UA Poetry Center Blog, The Rumpus, CALYX, So to Speak, and elsewhere. She has been a panelist for OutWrite, RAWIFest, and DC's Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here events as a Kurdish-American poet. Holly is currently on the staff of Poetry Daily and lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and dog.

Tracy Fuad's first book of poetry, about:blank, won the Donald Hall Prize and was published in October by University of Pittsburgh Press. Written before and during the years the author spent living in Iraqi Kurdistan, the collection documents the alienation of being inside, outside, and between language(s) and the always-already terror of grammar. She is also the author of two chapbooks: PITH (Newfound, 2020) and DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD (TxtBooks, 2019). A graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program, she is a 2021-22 Writing Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and lives in Berlin, where she teaches at the Berlin Writers' Workshop.

Pınar Banu Yaşar is a Kurdish poet whose work can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, HVTN, La Bruja Roja, and is forthcoming in the upcoming print anthology Processing Crisis published by Risk Press and Saint Mary’s College of California. They are an alum of the Tin House SWW as well as the KR Writer's Workshop, a Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize Finalist, a Poetry Online Launch Prize Finalist, and a Best of the Net Nominee. They can be found on Twitter.