Offsite for Fatimah Asghar's Daughter of the Mountains
About this Event
Please join us in welcoming back Fatimah Asghar to celebrate the release of their new poetry collection at Xoco House Gallery in Chicago, with Eve L. Ewing & Jamila Woods.
This is a ticketed, offsite event. Tickets are required for entry.
A tender, searching collection that breaks open notions of faith to ask how a daughter, alienated from kin, can find love and a home in the world, from the award-winning author of If They Come for Us and When We Were Sisters
“There is, in Daughter of the Mountains, an almost supernatural sense of connectedness, compassion. It’s a blueprint and a manifesto. I sit in stunned gratitude at its guidance.”—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!
at the edge of an edge
is an edge. at that edge
is a cliff. beyond that cliff
is me.
Exiled from ancestral homelands, how can one find a place for themself in the world? In this stunning sophomore collection, the acclaimed poet Fatimah Asghar unweaves residual grief to reckon with their relationship to Allah, long-estranged but deeply loved kin, the landscape of their ancestors, and love itself.
In meditative poems, Daughter of the Mountains grapples with multiple facets of fulfillment, betrayal, love, loss, and longing, illustrating how place, lineage, and environment inform the practice of spirituality and vice versa. With wisps of humor, imagery that is as beautiful as it is startling, and powerfully disruptive formal invention, this is an intimately lyrical and explosive collection.
Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. They also were a co-producer on Ms. Marvel for Disney + and wrote the episode "Time And Again." Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans.
Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author, most recently, of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, as well as the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series and Black Panther, and is currently writing Exceptional X-Men. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
Jamila Woods is a poet, singer, songwriter and performing artist from Chicago's South Side. Jamila has released a trio of acclaimed albums: Heaven, Legacy! Legacy! and Water Made Us. Her writing has been published in POETRY, Poets.org, and The Offing, and was featured in the 2023 anthology “Black Love Letters.” She has been awarded writing residencies at Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, BLKSPACE on Ryder Farm, and Civitella Ranieri. An award-winning poet, Jamila’s work often blurs boundaries between poem and song. As cultural critic Doreen St. Felix writes in her review of HEAVN, “It makes you wish all singers were poets.”
Accessibility: To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected]. We have a limited amount of free scholarship tickets for this event. To receive one, please email [email protected].
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 11.49 to USD 32.49
