Contemporary Poetry: The Arab American Turn

Thursday, September 8, 2022

5:30 pm -

Please join the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies on Thursday, September 8th for the Annual AAEF Dr. Burhan and Mrs. Misako Ajouz Professor of Arab Studies Distinguished Lecture in Literature: “Contemporary Poetry: The Arab American Turn,” a discussion of Fady Joudah’s “Tethered to Stars: Poems” and Hayan Charara’s “These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems.” This discussion will be moderated by Dr. Sally Connolly, Department of English University of Houston.

The AAEF Ajouz Lecture will be held on Thursday, September 8th, 2022, at the Hilton University of Houston’s Waldorf Ballroom, with a reception at 5:30 pm followed by a discussion at 6:00 pm.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018). Joudah’s fifth and most recent collection, Tethered to Stars: Poems (2021) was selected as a Library Journal Best Book of Poetry of 2021.

Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. He is a professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston, where he also teaches creative writing. His poetry books are These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit (2022), Something Sinister (2016), The Sadness of Others (2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.

Dr. Sally Connolly is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and Associate Dean of Student and Faculty Success for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Her first book, Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets After Auden (2016), was the first ever critical study of the elegies that poets write for each other. Her second book, Ranches of Isolation: Transatlantic Poetry (2018) considers the (sometimes vexed) nature of transatlantic poetic relations in a series of wide-ranging essays. She is currently working on a book about the poetry of the AIDS epidemic.

This event is free and open to the public. Masks encouraged. Directions: Hilton University of Houston Waldorf Ballroom, 2nd Floor 4450 University Dr, Houston, TX 77204 Parking is available in the Hilton University of Houston underground garage.

For more information, please contact: cas@central.uh.edu

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