Poetry Salon: Tarik Dobbs

Reviews for NAZAR BOY:

In their compelling debut Nazar Boy, Tarik Dobbs writes across and against the borders of race, class, ability, and sexual orientation—the checkpoints wherein the body is scrutinized, surveilled, and othered in ways meant to define and contain. This book demands a reckoning—both personal and national. In the precise mirror of these poems we find both the darkness and its necessary illumination, a way to confront ourselves.
—Natasha Trethewey, author of The House of Being
Nazar Boy (with its visual, lyrical, political, and spiritual ferocity) is one of the best debuts in recent memory. Do I mean spiritual? Yes, I feel the shape of my own soul when I read Tarik Dobbs’s work. From war and within war, with love and hammer, long hope and deep memory, Dobbs crafts a weapon of a book that will cut you deep and good. May this work ignite us towards freedom.
—Danez Smith, author of Homie

About the Poets:

Tarik Dobbs (b. 1997, Dearborn, MI) is a writer, artist, and Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Poems by Dobbs have been featured in the anthologies Best New Poets and Best of the Net, as well as in AGNI, American Poetry Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Dobbs is the director of poetry.onl and has served as a guest editor at Mizna and Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Dobbs holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an M.F.A. in art, theory, practice from Northwestern University. In fall 2024, Dobbs will join Southwest Minnesota State University as assistant professor of English in creative writing. The debut poetry collections by Dobbs, (June 11, 2024) and Dearbornistan (2026), are from Haymarket Books.

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the executive editor of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence.

Golden (they/them) is a Black, gender-nonconforming, trans photographer, poet, educator, curator, and community organizer raised in Hampton, Virginia (Kikotan land), and currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts (Massachusett People land). Golden is the author of A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE (Game Over Books, 2022), a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2023, and the photographic series On Learning How to Live, winner of the 2023 Queer|Art Illuminations Grant & a 2021 Arnold Newman Photography Prize finalist. On Learning How to Live documents Black trans life at the intersections of surviving and living in the United States. Golden holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University.

Mollie O’Leary is a poet from Massachusetts. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Washington. Mollie’s chapbook The Forgetting Curve was published in 2023 through Poetry Online's chapbook contest. Her poetry has appeared in Chestnut Review, McNeese Review, wildness, and elsewhere. Mollie has participated in workshops through Tin House and Inprint; she has also attended artist residencies in Mexico, Italy, and Norway.

Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. She is a New York University MFA graduate, Kundiman fellow, and founding editor at Pizza Pi Press. Her full-length collection THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a 2018 finalist for The Believer’s Poetry Award and won the 2017 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize awarded by the Radius of Arab American Writers and University of Arkansas Press. Find her at jessrizkallah.com.

Host or Publisher Beacon Hill Books & Cafe