Haleh Liza Gafori Performs Joy in Our Moment Through Rumi's Mystical Poetry

Join us on Monday April 13th 2026 at 2:30 PM for an performance filled with reflection and inspiration. This event will take place at Paul Robeson Galleries @Express Newark, where you'll have the chance to hear directly from the artist herself.

This performance is part of the Cultral Programming Grant and hosted by Rutgers University-Newark's Department of Arts, Culture and Media, (ACM) and SHINE Portrait Studio @ Express Newark.

Haleh Liza Gafori, whose two volumes of translated poetry by the thirteenth-century sage Rumi have been internationally lauded for their lyricism, vibrancy, and resonance with our contemporary social and political moment. Weaving translations, songs, and commentary, translator and performance artist Gafori transmits Rumi's poetry and wisdom and reveals the urgent and tender ways in which Rumi dialogues with us in our times. Offering glimpses of the astonishing rhythms of the original Persian text, Gafori resonates the complexity of personal history, the honoring of personal journey, and, ultimately, the pursuit of resiliency and joy.

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, performance artist, poet, vocalist, and educator born in NYC of Persian descent. Her acclaimed translations of poems by the 13th century sage Rumi have been published in two volumes Gold (2022) and Water (2025) by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics.

Gafori is a 2026 and 2024 MacDowell fellow and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts. Her translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, Paris Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, and others. Sharing her passion for Rumi’s poetry and the liberating messages that pulse through them, Gafori has lectured and offered workshops across the country and abroad at universities and institutions including Stanford University, Sarah Lawrence College, the Academy of American Poets, Columbia University, the Women’s Library in Istanbul, and Union Theological Seminary. She is on the faculty at St Joseph’s University’s Brooklyn Writers Foundry MFA Program in Creative Writing, where she teaches the Art of Translation.

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