A poetry reading with Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game, and Faisal Mohyuddin, author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children. A Q&A and signing will follow the reading.
About The Amoeba Game: On a journey that begins in South Florida and ends up in Romania, the country of her family’s forgotten history, Tara Skurtu plays “the amoeba game,” a game that has no rules. With subtle and serious humor, with the vivid spontaneity of memory and dreams, and with surgical precision, these compelling, mysterious poems hold up a lens that reveals the slippery and changing dimensions of our many selves.
Tara Skurtu is an American poet, literary translator, and public speaker based in Romania. A two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, her poems are published in magazines such as Salmagundi, The Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Review. Tara is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game (Eyewear Publishing). She was a lecturer in creative writing and composition at Boston University, taught incarcerated students through BU’s Prison Education Program, and was on the planning and teaching team for Robert Pinsky’s inaugural MOOC, “The Art of Poetry.” She works as a game writer and teaches creative writing in Bucharest.
About The Displaced Children of Displaced Children: Moving through past, present and future, this is a family history that journeys between America, Pakistan, modern Europe and even into space. Faisal Mohyuddin delves into the past of his parents and their neighbours in Pakistan and India in a self-consciously impossible attempt to find some way of belonging to a place that is lost. Moving from elegant ghazals of lament to stuttering, disjointed phrases of yearning, Mohyuddin portrays with restrained emotion the complexities of what it is to be displaced, geographically, spiritually, psychologically. With moments of sorrow interspersed with unsettling humour, deep familial love and celebrations of beauty, it is a story recognizable to any who have felt displaced in a new world. If the personal is political, then this is truly poetry for our times.
Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear Publishing, 2018), winner of the 2017 Sexton Prize for Poetry and a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society. Also the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone Press, 2017), he is a recipient of the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner and of a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award. He serves as an educator advisor to the global not-for-profit Narrative 4, teaches English at Highland Park High School in Illinois, and lives with his family in Chicago.
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