Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 5
This panel explores the rocketing and ricocheting of American foreign policies across continents, oceans, generations, diasporas, and language. With readings and discussion, our poetic, nonfiction, and fiction panelists will reflect on the ways that US bombs and drones unleashed in "faraway" wars, far from the popular American imagination, invade our bodies, memories, families, homes, and dreams within US borders and beyond. This panel takes place on October 7th, the anniversary of the US's invasion of Afghanistan.
Featured authors include Hala Alyan (author of the novel The Arsonists’ City and the poetry collection The Moon That Turns You Back), Sahar Muradi (author of the poetry collection OCTOBERS), Jen Soriano (author of Nervous: Essays on Heritage & Healing), and Maine Lit Fest Fellow Leila Nadir.
Free event. Register for Zoom Link.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Sahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is author of the chapbook [ G A T E S ], the hybrid memoir Ask Hafiz (winner of the 2021 Patrons’ Prize for Emerging Artists from Thornwillow Press), and the chaplet A Garden Beyond My Hand. She is co-editor, with Seelai Karzai, of EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora; and co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Sahar is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award in Poetry, a Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, and twice recipient of the Himan Brown Poetry Award. Her writing has been supported by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bethany Arts Community, Blue Mountain Center, and WOC Writers. She is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association, directs the arts education programs at City Lore, and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot. saharmuradi.com
Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist and writer whose work appears in literary and scholarly journals, in museums and galleries, and in forests, classrooms, and kitchens. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Khôra, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, ASAP, and Aster(ix), and has been supported by awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the de Groot Foundation, and Aspen Words. More info: https://leilanadir.xyz/. Instagram: @afghan_vegan
Jen Soriano (she/they) is a Filipinx-American lyric essayist and performer living on unceded Duwamish territory in Seattle. They are the author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry, and the lyric essay collection Nervous, now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.
Jen has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. They are particularly proud to have been selected as a Jack Jones Yi Dae Up Fellow, thanks to a scholarship founded by Alexander Chee in honor of his grandmother. She is co-editor of Amanda Solomon Amorao and DJ Kuttin Kandi’s anthology Closer to Liberation: Pin[a/x]y Activism in Theory and Practice. She is also the author of "Multiplicity From the Margins," published by Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, which explores the potential of intersectional form to disrupt oppressive narratives and expand narrow worldviews.
Jen was the 2022-2023 poet in residence with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. She holds a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in nonfiction and fiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She works as an organizational development consultant and narrative strategist for social justice institutions, and is a co-founder of the digital rights and narrative power building organizations MediaJustice and ReFrame.
