Tarfia Faizullah with Elizabeth Robin
Fri, Apr 12
|Gage Hall
Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York to Bangladeshi immigrants, and raised in Texas. She is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Please see "About the Event" for more information and Zoom links.
Time & Location
Apr 12, 2024, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EDT
Gage Hall, 4 Archdale St, Charleston, SC 29401, USA
Guests
About the event
Zoom Link for Friday's Reading
Zoom Link for Saturday's Seminar/Workshop
Tarfia's writing has appeared widely in the US and abroad. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and other honors, Faizullah presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, New York University, Barnard College, University of California Berkeley, the Poetry Foundation, the Clinton School of Public Service, Brac University, and elsewhere. In 2016, Harvard Law School included Faizullah in their list of 50 Women Inspiring Change.
Workshop Info
TO BE A LEAF: Poetry and the Environment
"Landscape and language aren't particularly easy to separate," says Camille T. Dungy. We'll look at how that idea may manifest by considering poems by Dungy herself, as well as poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, Fatimah Asghar, Mai Der Vang, and Lucille Clifton, and others, and begin drafts of our own poems.
Elizabeth Robin retired to Hilton Head Island after a 33-year career as a high school teacher to devote herself to writing.
To My Dreamcatcher, Robin’s first full-length poetry collection, begins with a bird’s journey and winds through encounters with ghosts and dreamcatchers, trees and rushing falls, to a spiritual place inside a painting, the moon, a national park. As she travels through her past in the title poem, “To My Dreamcatcher,” an elegy to her late husband, she moves from margins to the page’s middle, and finds a comfortable place in which to tell her story. Within such spaces, Robin tackles the challenge: as a woman alone, finishing life well.
She has two chapbooks through Finishing Line Press: Where Green Meets Blue (2018), an homage to her late husband and new Lowcountry home; and Silk Purses and Lemonade (2017), a story that finds hope inside a tangle of grief. In 2021 she won the Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship from the South Carolina Writers Association and the John Edward Johnson Prize from the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Robin emcees a monthly open mic and partners with arts groups to bring literary programs to Hilton Head Island.