Words on Terror (ft. Solmaz Sharif, Mariam Ghani, Cathy Park Hong, & Rickey Laurentiis)

Two years ago on this month, we celebrated the release of Solmaz Sharif's award-winning debut poetry collection Look. Her poetry bears witness to, in the words of NPR, “war in the Middle East, the war on terror, the devastation ravaged upon families in the name of freedom.” Featuring poets and artists Mariam Ghani, Cathy Park Hong, Rickey Laurentiis, and Solmaz Sharif herself, they read from their work analyze state sponsored violence through language, form poems from redacted letters to people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, and parse what Rickey Laurentiis calls “the fault line from Ferguson to Palestine.” Moderated and introduced by AAWW Editorial Director Jyothi Natarajan.

Om Podcasten

AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, an NYC literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice. Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our current and past events, as well as occasional original episodes. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang. Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, and dedicated to social justice. We curate our events to juxtapose novelists and activists, poets and intellectuals, and bring together people who usually wouldn’t be in the same room. We’ve got it all: from avant-garde poetry to post-colonial politics, feminist comics to lyric verse, literary fiction to dispatches from the left. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we believe Asian American stories deserve to be told. Learn more by visiting aaww.org Produced by the Asian American Writers' Workshop.