Radical Poetry Reading with Haleh Liza Gafori

Translator, vocalist, poet, and educator Haleh Liza Gafori was born in New York City of Persian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has maintained and deepened her connection through singing and translating the poetry of various Persian poets for well over a decade. Her book GOLD features her translations of poems by Rumi, the 13th century sage and mystic and was released in March, 2022 by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics, distributed by Penguin Random House. A graduate of Stanford University, her own work has been published by Columbia University Press and Literary Hub among others. As a vocalist, she has performed at David Byrne’s One Note series at Carnegie Hall and Bonnaroo. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Born in Buffalo, NY, and raised in Cambridge, MA, Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, most recently Second Childhood (Graywolf, 2014). She has received many awards, including those from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. Howe has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Poet, essayist, performer, filmmaker, and scholar Kythe Heller is based in Cambridge, MA. She is author of the Massachusetts Book Award-nominated poetry collection Firebird (Arrowsmith, 2020), two chapbooks, critical studies on mysticism and poetics, published by Cambridge University Press and Akron Series in Contemporary Poetry, and editor of a forthcoming anthology of international poetry translations (Stenen Press). She is the founder and creative director of international arts and research collective Vision Lab and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard University; currently, she is completing a doctorate in Comparative Religion at Harvard University.

Poet Timothy Liu is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently LET IT RIDE. He lives in Woodstock, NY.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, poet, playwright, and translator Ariana Reines has published nine books of poetry, most recently A Sand Book (2019). Her poems have been anthologized in Corrected Slogans (2013) and other publications. At once personal, romantic, slippery, and extreme, Reines’s poetry investigates and overturns lyric conventions. Reines was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2020. She has taught at Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. In 2009 she was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley, the youngest poet to ever hold that position. She has also served as a translator on United Nations missions to Haiti.