The annual Open Mouth Poetry Festival is here! Join us for our first reading on Friday, October 29th, 2021 at 7:00pm Central with features Threa Almontaser, Danielle Badra, Banah el Ghadbanah, Carolyn Guinzio, and Mohja Kahf, with an opening mini-feature by Vasantha Sambamurti.
The reading will take place virtually via Zoom with Zoom auto captions, and an ASL interpreter will be present. CART service will also be provided. Access copies of all poems will be provided via Google Docs.
FEATURED READERS:
Threa Almontaser is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press) selected by Harryette Mullen for the 2020 Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of awards from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright program, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA and TESOL certification from North Carolina State University.
Danielle Badra received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse (forthcoming), BAHR, Mizna, Cincinnati Review, Duende, The Greensboro Review, Bad Pony, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Split This Rock, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021.
Banah el Ghadbanah (she/they/zhe) is a mermaid from Syria raised in the u.s south. Their poems can be found in Mizna, Poetry Northwest, the Women’s Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are the recipient of the Diverse Voices Prize from Dzanc Books and their first book, we are on this earth to be free, is forthcoming in June 2022. Zhe holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego where zhe studied Syrian women’s creativity in revolution and siege.
Carolyn Guinzio’s most recent collection is A Vertigo Book (The Word Works, 2021), winner of The Tenth Gate Prize. Earlier collections include Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012), winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room Of Her Own Prize, and the visual poems Ozark Crows (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry and many other journals. Her short films have appeared at Poetry Film Live, Magma, Atticus Review and elsewhere. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com.
Mohja Kahf, professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arkansas since 1995, is author of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Hagar Poems, E-mails from Scheherazad, My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit, and Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. Her writing has been translated to Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, German, and French. She has won the Pushcart Prize and the Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist award. Kahf competed in the 1999 National Poetry Slam on Team Ozarks alongside the late Brenda Moossy (an Arab American poet who established slam poetry in northwest Arkansas).
OPENING MINI-FEATURE
Vasantha Sambamurti is a poet, translator, and prose writer. They are pursuing an MFA at the University of Arkansas’ Program in Creative Writing and Translation, where they received the Carolyn F. Walton Cole and Lily Peter Fellowships in Poetry. She is a senior editor for Transition Magazine, founded in Uganda in 1961 by Rajat Neogy, now based at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Portland Review, the minnesota review, Cream City Review, The Hunger, & elsewhere.