Lubna Safi

Leila Chatti and Lubna Safi

23 JUNE 2022 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Lubna Safi, Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, Walt McDonald First Book Poetry Prize-winner, and Leila Chatti, Deluge and , The Mothers: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation, co-authored with Dorianne Laux, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, June 23, at 7:00 pm PDT. We are pleased to bring you this exciting event via Zoom. To register, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

Featured books for this reading are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash, www.writerscenter.org/product/the-mothers, and at Texas Tech University Press, www.ttupress.org/search-results/?supapress_order=publishdate-desc&page_number=2. This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley.
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MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Leila Chatti's debut full-length collection is Deluge, winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Naomi Shihab Nye said in The New York Times, "To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge…, Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. In a frightening two-year saga of a tumor and the 'flooding' it caused, Chatti finds not disassociation but deeper association with her own experience." She is also co- author of The Mothers: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation, a chapbook, with Dorianne Laux, and other chapbooks. Tunisian-American dual citizen born in Oakland, Chatti has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares's Emerging Writer's Contest, Narrative's 30 Below Contest, Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, among others, and appear in The New York Times Magazine, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets.

Lubna Safi's debut poetry collection is Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, winner of the Walt McDonald Prize First-Book Series in Poetry. Texas Tech University Press says, "Your Blue and the Quiet Lament records the textures of grief after a cousin's murder at the hands of the Syrian state reaches the poet through a long-distance phone call. The poems trace a narrative of arrest, imprisonment, and torture in Syria and interweave the difficulties a family experiences in the diaspora. Shifting between the death of poet Federico García Lorca and that of her cousin, Lubna's poetry contends with personal loss by distancing the meaning of one death through the intermediary of another. Yet the distortion of distance is already there—in the language, in the geographic space, in time, in the grief itself—tinged with blue." Along with poetry, Lubna Safi also writes fiction, literary criticism, and lyric essays. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Journal, MIZNA, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.