To celebrate the opening of Shilpa Gupta’s I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt we organize an afternoon of readings in Café & Bookstore.
Taking our cue from Shilpa’s sculptural installation For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017-18) we organize an afternoon of readings authored by writers who have been banned, censured, or imprisoned. Ranging from contemporary U.S. publications, to historical texts and literature from other parts of the world (some of which will be read in their original language as well as in English translation), the afternoon’s selection emphasizes the power, resilience, and relevance of literary imagination in the face of repression.
Alongside Shilpa Gupta and Salil Tripathi, who will read from their recent publication For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, we have invited a group of 12 international poets, translators, librarians, writers, and editors to select and present readings.
After the reading, at 6pm, we host a party and reception in our 315 Maujer courtyard.
Access to the ground-level event space and is step-free and wheelchair accessible. If you have a specific access requirement, please contact contact@amant.org
Salil Tripathi was born in Mumbai and lives in New York. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of three works of non-fiction. Salil has reported out of Asia, Europe, and Africa. His articles have appeared in many prominent publications. He studied at the University of Bombay and at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College, and served as chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee and is now a member of its board.
Stephanie Pacheco is a student and an organizer from The Bronx, and the 2023 NYC Youth Poet Laureate. From her early high school years to now, Stephanie has been a fierce advocate for educational equity and social justice across New York City. Her poetry and advocacy has been highlighted by The Today’s Show, The New York Times, The Daily News, CBS. She is a recipient of the 2021 Princeton Prize in Race Relations. A member of her school’s Writer’s Guild, Urban Word NYC’s 2022 Slam Team, and a Black Girl Magic Fellow.
Lynn Xu was born in Shanghai and is the author of the full-length collections Debts & Lessons , 2013 and And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight , 2022, which was on view last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson as an exhibition of the same title. She has performed cross-disciplinary works at the MOCA Tucson, Guggenheim Museum, The Renaissance Society, Rising Tide Projects, and 300 S. Kelly Street. She teaches at Columbia University, coedits Canarium Books, and lives with her family in New York City and West Texas.
Joshua Edwards is author of The Double Lamp of Solitude, Architecture for Travelers, The Exhausted Dream, and a few other books; and he translated María Baranda’s Ficticia and co-translated Lao Yang’s Pee Poems. He directs Canarium Books, and teaches at Columbia University and Pratt Institute.
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. In 2021, She published If The Capitol Rioters Had Been Black with F magazine and Motherbox Gallery. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is an online faculty of SAIC’s low-res MFA program, teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the program for 5 consecutive years.
Leigh Hurwitz is the Collections Manager at Brooklyn Public Library. As a member of BPL’s Books Unbanned team, they won the 2023 Library Journal Librarian of the Year Award. Leigh also created the ongoing comics programming series Cool Work x Interesting People.
Sarah Riggs is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and co-founder of Tamaas. She is the author of seven books of poetry in English, most recently Eavesdrop , 2020, The Nerve Epistle , 2021, and Murmurations, 2021. She has translated and co-translated seven books of contemporary French poetry into English, including Etel Adnan's TIME , 2019, recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. Alongside Omar Berrada, Riggs co-edited Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets in Translation, forthcoming from Litmus Press.
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu Kaza is a writer, translator, artist, and educator based in New York. She is the author of Lines of Flight (forthcoming, Ugly Duckling Presse) and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that connects migration to translation, and which features diasporic and BIPOC translators.
Aristilde Kirby is an artist from the Bronx, New York. Her work covers the bases of poetry, performance, and cultural criticism. These works have been featured in Miguel Abreu Gallery, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Entrance, The Poetry Project, Smack Mellon, and as a part of Texte Zur Kunst’s Velvet Voice Club at the Roter Salon, Volksbühne. She has published a book, Daisy & Catherine², with Auric Press (now in its second run at auricpress.com) as well as chapbooks with Belladonna*, Black Warrior Review, & The Best American Experimental Writing 2020.
Sara M Saleh is a writer, human rights lawyer, organizer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published widely in English and Arabic in Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Red Room, Kill Your Darlings, Rabbit Poetry Journal, SBS, and in anthologies the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, Racism, Making Mirrors, Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word, A Blade of Grass, Groundswell: The Best of Australian Poetry, Borderless: a transnational anthology of feminist poetry, Racism, and Another Australia. She is co-editor of the groundbreaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity.