Nathalie Handal and Megan Kaminski
Monday, May 14 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, such as, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetrywales, Ploughshares, Poetry New Zealand, Crab Orchard Review, and The Literary Review; and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has read her poetry worldwide, and has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR Radio as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo. Her poetry collections include, The NeverField; The Lives of Rain, shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Menada Literary Award; and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award 2011, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía (University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2012) is “a unique recreation, in reverse, of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, considered one of the most significant books ever published about New York City.” She is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, the AE Ventures Fellowship, an Honored Finalist for the 2009 Gift of Freedom Award, and was shortlisted for New London Writers Awards and The Arts Council of England Writers Awards.
She has promoted international literature through translation, research, and the editing of the groundbreaking The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets bestseller and winner of the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and the co-editing along with Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar of the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co.)
She teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, most recently in Africa, and as Picador Guest Professor, Leipzig University, Germany. She is Books Review Editor and tutor for Sable Literary Magazine and Forum, United Kingdom; an executive board member for Palfest; a Member of the Laboratory of Frontiers Studies at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil; and an Advisory Board Member for The Center for Literary Translation, at the Levantine Center, Los Angeles. She is currently a professor at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at Sierra Nevada College. Handal writes the blog-column, The City and the Writer, for Words Without Borders magazine.
Love and Strange Horses
Because we no longer heard the hoofs of horses,
Because we no longer saw them galloping, no longer saw
them standing on the coral shore, we asked,
where does the music of the human voice hide?Can you find its song
in the sea, uncertain of its waters,
in the field, uncertain of its hay,
in the cherry blossoms, uncertain of its soil,
between miles of fallen trunks,
or perhaps in the freeze after the heat?Because we no longer saw what is holy and wet,
because we called the Titans and the horse thieves
and the only message they sent back was:
In the end, nature will be
roaring, drowning, ruining, ruling,
we asked, can we dare love to find
the legend abandoned in musica
as grass reaches out for our weeping.
Megan Kaminski lived in Los Angeles, Paris, Casablanca, New York, Virginia and Portland before moving to Lawrence, Kansas, four years ago. Her first book of poetry, Desiring Map, is forthcoming from Coconut Books (2012). She is also the author of four chapbooks, favored daughter (Dancing Girl Press 2012), collection (Dusie, 2011), carry catastrophe (Grey Book Press, 2010), Across Soft Ruins (Scantily Clad Press, 2009), and has chapbooks forthcoming from the Little Red Leaves Textile Series and La Ginestra. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas, where she directs the Creative Writing Exchange and the Undergraduate Reading Series. She also curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence.
from Favored Daughter
The music of birds survived neither winter nor Berlin
Glass leaves strewn sideways down hills
once wrapped in yellow flowers
contorted day brings vessels
filled water and ice
drip slow from a bleaker expanse
whiter memory light from the gas lamp
shadow cast on wallboard
and the hum of unknown outbursts
