PSNY Virtual Workshop: Voices of the Levant & Anti-Imperialist Poetics

With poet Ruth Awad!

Edward Said wrote in Culture & Imperialism, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings,” contending that Western literature and media are just as much tools of conquest as weapons. This workshop will examine contemporary poetry from the long-colonized Levant to teach us about countering colonialist narratives and shaping anti-imperialist futures. We’ll look to Palestinian and Lebanese poets, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Hedy Habra, Fady Joudah, Hala Alyan, Refaat Alareer, and Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, to discover verse as a vehicle of resistance, archival, dignity, and liberation, and as a tether to homelands under siege.

About the Instructor: Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**

Host or Publisher The Poetry Society of New York