Please join us for a reading of poems and poems in translation by Olivia Elias, Cynthia Manick, and Etel Adnan
at the FiveMyles, 558 St Johns Place, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Elias and Manick will share poems from their respective collections, “Ton Nom de Palestine” (éditions al Manar) and “Blue Hallelujahs” (Black Lawrence Press), and translators Sarah Riggs and Marine Cornuet will read translated poems by the two writers. Sarah Riggs and Omar Berrada will also read from Etel Adnan’s forthcoming book in both English and French.
Doors open at 7:30pm.
The reading starts at 8:00pm.
Free.
Olivia Elias is a poet of the Palestinian diaspora. Born in Haifa, she then lived in Lebanon where her family found refuge after being forced into exile. She attended university in Canada where she taught Economic Science, before moving to France in the early 1980s. Olivia Elias has been a writer for some time, but decided to publish her work only recently. After Je suis de cette bande de sable (May 2013, out of print), two other books were published: L’espoir pour seule protection (introduction by Philippe Tancelin, éditions alfabarre, February 2015) and Ton nom de Palestine (éditions al Manar, January 2017). Olivia Elias has participated to many summits-readings in different settings/places, in France and abroad. Several of her poems have been translated into Italian and Spanish, and Ton nom de Palestine is currently being translated into English. Other poems have been published in the literary supplement of L’Orient le jour, in the magazine Phoenix, and on two websites for which she serves as a columnist, Terre à Ciel and Recours au poème.
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts among others. A winner of the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and a 2017 recipient of the Barbara Memorial Fund Award for Poetry; Manick serves as East Coast Editor of the independent press Jamii Publishing and is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her poem “Things I Carry Into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems, a organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month and WNET Reel 13 Shorts. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Muzzle Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Marine Cornuet is a poet, translator, and arts administrator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her first Chapbook, Keeping the Wheat and the Chaff, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Her work can be found in IDK Magazine, 8-West Press, Dime Show Review, Handsly Lit, and elsewhere. She is a member of Sweet Action, a women-led poetry collective in Brooklyn.
Sarah Riggs is a writer, artist, filmmaker and translator, www.sarahriggs.org. She has published poetry books with 1913 Press, Burning Deck, Reality Street, Ugly Duckling Presse, Chax, Editions de l’attente, and Le Bleu du Ciel as well as chapbooks with Belladonna* and Contrat Maint, and critical essays with Routledge. Forthcoming are paintings in collaboration with Emily Wallis Hughes’ book of poetry, Sugar Factory, with Spuyten Duyvil, a show of drawings for Laynie Browne’s Amulet Sonnets (forthcoming also as a book with Solid Objects) and translations of Etel Adnan’s Time from the French with Nightboat forthcoming 2019. Producer of The Tangier 8 and director of Six Lives, Riggs is currently working on a film of New York dancer choreographers including Daria Faïn, Emily Johnson, and Douglas Dunn. She has taught at Columbia and NYU in Paris, as well as Pratt in Brooklyn, and is working with Mirene Arsanios on the web publication of “Footprint Zero,”a project of especially New York and Morocco-based artists responding to the environmental crisis, for of the non-profit Tamaas, www.tamaas.org