PoemAlley
and other members of the area poetry community are invited this coming Sunday to a poetry salon hosted by Franklin Street Works of Stamford,
featuring (above, left to right) three culturally-diverse poets, Sara Elkamel, Jan-Henry
Gray, and Malcolm Tariq, who dissect normatively-imposed concepts of distortion and invisibility in relation to nationality, ethnicity and gender
identity as part of their creative practice.
The
free reading, beginning at 3:15 pm, is partially sponsored through the Stamford
Arts & Culture Community Arts Partnership Program and
complements FSW’s current exhibit, Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text, which will end its run on January 26 with a closing party, offering a complementary wine/champagne reception and a final tour conducted by program curator Danilo Machado (right), who selected the three poets for their alignment with the themes
of the program.
Based
in New York City and her hometown Cairo, Sara has facilitated various
writing workshops in Alexandria, Amman, Wadi Rum and other cities in Egypt and Jordan, addressing the relationship between text and the
body, memory and language, the notion and physicality of pilgrimage
and other topics central to her work.
She
holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and is
currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at New York University. Her
writing has appeared as part of the Halal If You Here Me anthology
edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo (Haymarket Books, 2019),
as well as in
The Rumpus, American Chordata, Winter Tangerine and other literary
journals.
A
Kundiman fellow also involved in numerous writing and poetry
workshops, Philippine-born Jan-Henry Gray was
raised in California, and worked as a chef in San Francisco for more
than 12 years. Living undocumented in the United States for more than three decades,
Jan-Henry graduated from SFU and the Columbia College Chicago’s MFA
program; he earned the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and awards
from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Academy of American
Jan-Henry's
first book, Documents,
was selected as the winner of the BOA Editions Poulin Poetry Prize in
2018. In addition to releasing a chapbook, selected
emails through speCt! Books, he has placed pieces in several publications,
from Chris Soto's Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat
Books, 2018) and the
Colorado Review, The Margins, Quarterly West and
Puerto del Sol.Malcolm Tariq’s Heed the Hollow: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2019) won the Cave Canem Prize, while 2017’s Extended Play received the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest for that year. A native of Savannah, Georgia, Malcolm’s poetry explores the invisibility and vulnerability of “the bottom” as it applies to blackness and sexuality against the backdrop of the American South. Malcolm holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan.
A
not-for-profit contemporary art space located in downtown
Stamford, Franklin Street Works has worked with more than 300
internationally exhibiting artists, curated 34 original
exhibitions, and has received two Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts grants and three Fairfield County's Community
Foundation grants. FSW exhibitions have also
received positive reviews and features in ArtCritical, Art
in America online, Art
New England,
Modern
Painters and other major art publications.
Find out more at http://www.franklinstreetworks.org.
When:
3-6
pm
Sunday, January 26, 2019
Where:
Franklin
Street Works
41
Franklin Street
Stamford,
CT 06901
Contact:
Creative
Director
