Feb 2022 – Virtual Convening!
Featuring Sara Elkamel, Hazem Fahmy, Abby Mengesha, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, Éléonore Weill, and Haolun Xu.
Happy Autumn Equinox!✨ The recording from the second convening of the New Third World Reading Series is now live on Youtube for your viewing pleasure! You can also find us on Instagram and on Twitter for more highlights, revolutionary texts, and updates on upcoming events 🖤
Some Notes
• Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s poems “Sohni to her Earthen Pot” and “Mahiwal, The Buffalo Herder” refer to the tale of Sohni-Mahiwal, one of the popular tragic romances of Punjab and Sindh and the focus of her next manuscript. Read it here.
• The poem Talukder sang the opening couplet from is Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s nazm, “Tufaan ba-dil hai hair koi dildaar dekhna.” Hear it here on Rekhta.
• Abby Mengesha’s poem “Tizita” refers to the Ethiopian/Amharic musical genre of Tizita, which in English translates to “memory, nostalgia, longing.” Listen to a playlist here.
• You can find Haolun Xu’s debut chapbook Ultimate Sun Cell (New Delta Review, 2021) here, and receive updates here on Long Beach, Xu’s narrative short film currently in post-production about three friends, the sea, and grief.
• You can find Sara Elkamel’s debut chapbook Fields of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books, 2021) here, and read her original translations of Mona Kareem’s poems here, here, and here.
• You can find Hazem Fahmy’s second collection Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo (Half Mystic Press, 2022) here, and catch him live next month at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ.
• Éléonore Weill performed two musical adaptations of Yiddish poems: the first by Celia Dropkin, a Russian-born Yiddish poet influential on early-twentieth century literary society in NYC; the second by writer and dramatist Aaron Zeitlin.