The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. Join panelists Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, three award-winning poets and editors as they discuss their seminal W.W. Norton anthology of Asian and Middle Eastern poetry as well as their own recent work. Language for a New Century collects together over 450 contemporary poets writing in 40 different languages, some being translated into English for the first time. The editors will discuss how the book came together, and how they feel the questions they were asking back then have or have not been answered in our current moment as well as their own new work.
Tina Chang, Brooklyn Poet Laureate, is the author of Half-Lit Houses, Of Gods & Strangers, and Hybrida (W.W. Norton, 2019). She is co-editor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Her poems have been published in journals such as American Poet, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Ploughshares. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among others. Hybrida was named one of the best books of 2019 by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, Lit Hub, and was the Paris Review’s Contributor’s Favorite Book of 2019. She is the Director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University.
Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Claire Messud writes, she “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination—a contemporary Orpheus.” Her recent poetry books include Life in a Country Album, a Finalist for the Foreword Book Award and the Palestine Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her poetry, essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, The Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, among others. She is a professor at Columbia University, and writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine.
Ravi Shankar, Pushcart prize winning poet, translator and professor has published, edited or has forthcoming over 15 books, including the Muse India award-winning translations of 9th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal, ‘The Autobiography of a Goddess’ (Zubaan/University of Chicago), ‘The Golden Shovel: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks” (University of Arkansas) and ‘The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017’ (Recent Works Press). Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton’s “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond” called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer and he founded one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and most recently, his collaborative chapbook, ‘A Field Guide to Southern China’ written with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes, was published in in the UK by Eyewear Publishing. He currently holds an international research fellowship from the University of Sydney and his memoir “Correctional” is forthcoming in 2021 with University of Wisconsin Press.
For more details, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.
