GOLD & WATER - RUMI & HALEH

A night of words and music featuring poetry by Rumi with acclaimed translator Haleh Liza Gafori. Drawing from her books GOLD, and the upcoming volume WATER (New York Review Books, 2022 and 2025), she'll weave translations with songs, chants, stories, lightning, and love. Doors open at 7:30pm and starts at 8pm

“Meanings and images hurtle us towards love and ecstasy, just as Rumi intended. Hang on tight as they begin whirling. Unbuckle your seat belt as they take flight. Gafori’s translations and delivery—pure Gold. - Bob Holman

“Ecstatic and piercing…[Haleh Liza Gafori] has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into the quick of our present. Each piece is a divine invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.” –
V (formerly Eve Ensler)

“Gafori’s GOLD is everything Rumi was himself—sacred, profane, laugh out loud funny, deeply earnest, demotic, and yes, Persian. There’s a rich fluency here not just in idiom but in gesture, in spirit.” – Kaveh Akbar

"Gafori’s translations of Rumi are exquisite, gorgeous, fluent, faithful…watching the performance felt like being inside a poem." - Padraig O'Tuama

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, composer, and performance artist of Iranian descent. Her acclaimed book, GOLD (New York Review Books Classics, 2022), features her translations of poems by Rumi, the 13th century sage and mystic. Her second volume of translations, WATER, will be released in 2025, also by New York Review Books. Gafori is a recipient of the MacDowell fellowship and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Gafori performs and lectures across the country at universities and venues including Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Lincoln Center, the Academy of American Poets online seminars, Joe’s Pub, and Le Poisson Rouge. Her work has been published by Columbia University Press, Harvard Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub and elsewhere.

Host or Publisher Bowery Poetry Club