Author Feature|| Rajiv Mohabir: I Will Not Go

Join us in community to celebrate the new groundbreaking anthology, I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals by award-winning poet, memoirist & translator Rajiv Mohabir!

Mohabir will be accompanied by special guests Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Kiran Maharaj, Krystal Ramroop, Aparna Paul.

Rajiv Mohabir is a poet, memoirist, and translator and the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals - In new groundbreaking anthology Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) engages with Indo-Caribbean language and culture, this time by inviting 17 diasporic writers to experiment with their own personal interpretations of two famous Chutney songs. Chutney music is a syncretic, Caribbean music born out of North Indian tunes and African beats. Caribbean Hindustani songs and poems, the basis for Chutney music, are no longer spoken with the frequency that they were two generations ago. To this end, Mohabir asked some of the most exciting Caribbean writers and poets working today to "translate" two popular Chutney songs. A Caribbean diasporic response in the manner of Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, this book expands on the idea of that translation classic with reimaginings, reinterpretations and compelling treatises on Chutney music. I Will Not Go collects poetry inherited by the descendants of indenture and, through its innovative reimagining, celebrates the poetry of survival.

Ticket price redeemable for in-store purchase- must be redeemed within 1 purchase during the night of the event.

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