Another Room to Live In Book Launch with Omar Berrada, Sarah Riggs, Safaa Fathy, Marilyn Hacker, Pierre Joris, Alisha Mascarenhas, and Yasmine Seale

Join us on Thursday, April 11 for the launch of Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets, edited by Omar Berrada and Sarah Riggs, and published by Litmus Press. Editors Berrada and Riggs will be joined for readings by contributors Safaa Fathy, Marilyn Hacker, Pierre Joris, Alisha Mascarenhas, and Yasmine Seale.

Another Room to Live In is an archive of encounter: a multilingual conversation between fifteen poet-translators, connected through friendship, correspondence, and cross-diasporic gatherings. With work in English, Arabic, and French, the collection moves beyond both language and nation-state, investing instead in transcontinental dreamspaces. Here, translation practices collaboratively transform the poems and reflect the poets’ own experiences of “living” in multiple languages. Complicating any flat conception of identity, the poems presented here seek to revisit and challenge foundational narratives, to rework mythologies, and to do all this through a cross-generational process of translation as poetic communion.

Contributors include: Etel Adnan, Hoda Adra, Sinan Antoon, Mirene Arsanios, Omar Berrada, Sara Elkamel, Soukaina Habiballah, Marilyn Hacker, Golan Haji, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Pierre Joris, Mona Kareem, Souad Labbize, Rachida Madani, Alisha Mascarenhas, Iman Mersal, Aya Nabih, Sarah Riggs, Yasmine Seale, Cole Swensen, Habib Tengour, and Sam Wilder.