Water to Water: Gaza Renga - Marilyn Hacker & Deema Shehabi (IN PERSON)

Award-winning poets Marilyn Hacker and Deema K. Shehabi visit the American Writers Museum to read from their powerful new book Water to Water: Gaza Renga, a poetry collaboration in the call-and-response form of Renga during the conflict in Gaza. The pair will have a conversation on their writing journey and share how the collaboration came to be. Books will be available for purchase and the poets will sign them following the program.

This is an in person program at the American Writers Museum. This program will also be livestreamed, and you can .

This program is presented in conjunction with the AWM's special exhibit , a powerful new exhibit that takes you on the ultimate exploration through spirituality and storytelling. American Prophets is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

More about Water to Water:

From the publisher: "In 2009, prompted by the Israeli siege of Gaza, poets Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi started a correspondence. It took the form of responding to each other's poems. They resumed their poetic dialogue by email after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.

Their project involved an alternate call and response between them in the tradition of the Japanese renga form, each poet picking up a word, phrase, or image from the poem preceding. The result is a fascinating poetic conversation. The two poetic voices are beautifully meshed together, so that it actually reads as one long poem.

The poetry is very rich in imagery, and these images stay with you, as do feelings the poems generate, for example, of unrest, of being in exile. Television and social media show you the pictures in the streets, this poetry takes you into the homes and minds of people. You can read it very much between the lines, and therefore it seems to speak to people about their own experiences.

Water to Water: Gaza Renga is a dignified celebration of humanity in and among atrocities. Although triggered by events in Gaza, it weaves in other conflicts past and present."

Praise for Water to Water:

"[A] stunning sequence of renga... We celebrate these two voices, bleeding in and out of each other, quicksilver, mercurial, eloquent in song and silence, even as they celebrate the human spirit in a ruptured world." —Mimi Khalvati

"This book's revolutionary form is most revolutionary of all in making serious political engagement and sophisticated poetic pleasure inseparable." —Fiona Sampson, Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton

MARILYN HACKER (left) is the author of twenty-one books of poems, including three collaborative books, and twenty-two collections of translations from the French. Over the course of her career, she has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Argana International Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, editor of the Kenyon Review, and editor of the French literary journal Siècle 21. She lives between Paris and New York.

DEEMA K. SHEHABI (right) is a Palestinian American poet and editor. She is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and the co-editor (with Beau Beausoleil) of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received NCBR's recognition award. She is also the winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize in 2018 and a recipient of Best of the Net nomination in 2021 as well as several Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and her work has been translated into Arabic, French, and Farsi.

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