Arcs-in-the-Sky: 5 Intercultural Poets: A Rail Reading curated by Sarah Riggs

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist and translator living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and Best New Poets, among other publications. Elkamel was named the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2022 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt. She is a poet, essay writer and filmmaker. She had her PhD form the Sorbonne University and has been director of programme Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Her plays Terror and Ordeal were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed a book, Tourner les mots. Her book of poetry Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel Texts) was first published in Egypt, then in France, and in Brazil. Safaa Fathy’s experimental book of poems entitled Al Haschische is forthcoming at Pamenar Press. She also experiments with the visual texture of poems in filmic forms. Fathy’s Name to the Sea, a film poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages.

Ghazal Mosadeq is poet and translator. Her writings have been published by Shearsman Books, gammm Press, Tamaas, Litmus Press, Firmament, Plumwood Mountain, ‘WD40, Revista de poesía, ensayo y crítica’, Senna Hoy, Oversound and Blackbox Manifold among others. She is the founder of Pamenar Press and is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Aya Nabih is a translator and writer born in Cairo. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Cairo University and MA in Audiovisual Translation from Hamad bin Khalifa University. She translated Lydia Davis’s collected short stories Varieties of Disturbance into Arabic, and her poetry collection Exercises to Develop Insomnia Skills has been published by Al-Kotob Khan. She was an artist-in-residence in Marrakech, Casablanca and New York, as part of a dance and poetry residency organized by Tamaas. She is currently working on her new collection Map of Time. She writes in Arabic and will be reading poems translated by Sara Elkamel.

Sarah Riggs is the author of seven books of poetry in English, including The Nerve Epistle and Pomme & Granite, which won a 1913 Poetry Prize, She is also the author of the essay collection, Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop & O’Hara. She has translated seven books of contemporary French poetry into English, including, most recently, Etel Adnan’s TIME (Nightboat, 2019), recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. She is also a filmmaker, artist, and host of the podcast Invitation to the Species. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Omar Berrada, with whom she has co-edited Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets in Translation (forthcoming).