F220.
Widening the Circle: Queer/Trans SWANA Writers on Navigating Space and Self
Friday, February 9, 2024
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Featuring Queer/Trans SWANA (Southwest Asian North African) writers, this multiple genre panel centers a discussion of how we build bridges, defying orientalist narratives by writing into the complexities of our hybrid identities. At a time when our communities continue to be marginalized in the United States, we will focus on the tension between homeland and diaspora, the power and violence of myths, and our need to queer form to represent ourselves, breaking convention and narrative in the process.
Participants
Mahru Elahi is a VONA alum, a Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, and a finalist for the Allegra Johnson Prize. Mahru writes as a K–12 educator, foster mom, and queer daughter of an Iranian immigrant and a California girl. An MFA student at Antioch University, Mahru lives in Oakland, California with her son.
Nancy Agabian is the author of three books, including the novel The Fear of Large and Small Nations, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. In 2021, she received Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. Nancy teaches creative writing at NYU.
Tracy Fuad is a 2022 NEA fellow and the author of Portal, which won the 2023 Phoenix Emerging Poets' Prize and will be published by the University of Chicago in February, 2024. Her first book about:blank won the 2020 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She teaches at the Berlin Writers' Workshop.
Bobuq Sayed is a queer Afghan writer, editor, and performance artist. They have received support from Kundiman, Tin House, the Lambda Writers Retreat, and San José State University’s Steinbeck fellowship. Their writing is published in Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, and The Drift.
Pınar Banu Yaşar is a Kurdish poet whose work can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, HVTN, Odes to Our Undoing: Writers Reflecting on Crisis. They are a Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize finalist, a Poetry Online Launch Prize finalist, and in 2022 they founded the Kurdish Poets Collective.
