S205.
In the Cosmopolis of Memory: Women on Cultural Selfhood in a Globalized World
Saturday, March 26, 2022
1:45 pm to 2:45 pm
Setting and place are at the center of our stories and identities—yet globalization and territorial violences create a complicated spatial “belonging." How do we place ourselves in our writing? Braving political strife, war, and displacement coupled with traumas of misrepresentation by dominant narratives, five women grounded in (global) Lebanese, Azerbaijani, Palestinian, and Pakistani cultures write and/or translate poetry, fiction, and memoir to recast histories and cultures in our own voices.
Participants
Alison Mandaville has received two UNESCO cultural heritage grants for her work supporting women writers and artists in Azerbaijan. A poet, scholar, and translator, she teaches at Fresno State. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in dozens of US and international journals and books.
Samina Najmi, professor of English at California State University, Fresno, writes essays centered on her life in Pakistan, the UK, and the US. She has just completed a book-length memoir of her home in Karachi. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, Entropy, The Rumpus, and The Progressive.
Shadab Zeest Hashmi, author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan, Kohl & Chalk, and Baker of Tarifa, is the winner of the San Diego Book Award and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize. Her work has been published worldwide and has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third full-length collection, titled O, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2022. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, and the Adroit Journal, among others.
Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and coeditor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received the Northern California Book Reviewers Recognition Award. She's also coauthor with Marilyn Hacker of Diaspo/Renga. She won the Nazim Hizkmet Poetry Prize in 2018.
