Award-winning poet Solmaz Sharif will read from her books of poetry “Look” and “Customs” Thursday, Sept. 29 at 5 p.m. in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall. The event is part of the in the Fall 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series for the Creative Writing Program in the Department of Literatures in English in the College of Arts & Sciences (A&S).

Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, a background that shaped her work as a poet. She described her poetry “first as ‘political’ then as ‘documentary,’” in an essay in the Kenyon Review. Her poetry collections address displacement and the American immigration system.

“Literary citizenship,” she said in a 2022 interview for BOMB magazine, “is tied to the exchange of these resources and affects what is produced. This citizenship asks of us allegiances and complicities and silences, dinners at tables that we promised to never sit at.”

Amanda Brockner is MFA Graduate Program Coordinator in the Department of Literatures in English.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.