Poetics as Witness: Workshop Series with Safia Elhillo
We're delighted to announce a short course with our International Writer in Residence, Safia Elhillo. Across two workshops, Safia will explore the role that poetry plays when witnessing and recounting world events. The workshops will take place online across one week in September and are open to poets at any stage of their career.
This project is supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.
Workshop 1: Let Me Not Turn Away
Let Me Not Turn Away asks its participants what it means to be witness to history, to horror, to violence. So many of us engage with unimaginable carnage every day through our phones and news feeds and the critical work of a contemporary poet is to figure out how to respond. Do we watch, knowing we can do nothing? Do we try to do something, however small? Do we try to turn away, back to our comfortable lives? Do we even really have a choice in how to respond?
This generative workshop examines poems that grapple with these questions – by poets like Aria Aber and José Olivarez – poems that witness, that look away, that are gripped and forced to return their gaze. The workshop will then invite participants to construct their own poetics of witnessing.
When: Tuesday, 8 September, 7-9pm BST
Where: Online
Tickets: £35 (Concessions available), £65 (Workshop pass to attend both workshops)
Workshop 2: Reconstituted Histories
In the face of theories of the end of history, the loss of faith in and dissolution of official narratives, and ongoing world-changing violence and destruction, this generative workshop invites poets to consider how to rewrite their own histories. We will consider poems by authors like Hayan Charara and Kyle Tran Myhre that weave together personal and global histories, revealing how delving into the rootedness of our individual accidents of birth can speak to the world and to broader trajectories of history. Poets will then be invited to write their own history poems, perhaps intersecting with or expanding out toward larger world historical events.
When: Thursday, 10 September, 7-9pm BST
Where: Online
Tickets: £35 (Concessions available), £65 (Workshop pass to attend both workshops)
Five free spaces per workshop will be offered to writers of Sudanese heritage — please get in touch via wasafiri@qmul.ac.uk if this is you, specifying which workshop(s) you would like to attend. Free places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Cover image by Suzy Hazelwood
Sudanese by way of Washington D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, Home Is Not a Country, and Bright Red Fruit, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Stanford University, and her awards include a California Book Award, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and an Arab American Book Award. She has been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the LA Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Penguin Book of Migration Literature and The New Yorker, among others. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a co-poetry editor at Callaloo and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University.