The Poetry Center is delighted to present poets Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, appearing from Brooklyn, New York.
Youmna Chlala is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press, 2019), with writing appearing in BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA, and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. As an artist, she has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dubai Art Projects, Hessel Museum of Art and MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, 7th LIAF Biennial in Norway, and 11th Performa Biennial. She is co-editing a new series for Coffee House Press entitled Spatial Species, and is a Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing Departments at the Pratt Institute.
Ken Chen was a 2019–2020 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where he worked on his next book Death Star. The book follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. He was the 2009 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his book Juvenilia, selected by Louise Glück. Chen served as the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008 to 2019, and co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice.
This remote access event is free and open to the public. Media Captioning provided after the event, at Poetry Center Digital Archive and at our YouTube channel); for other reasonable accommodations please contact [email protected].
Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.