Home > Events > Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me: Poetry by Palestinian Poet Ghassan Zaqtan

Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me: Poetry by Palestinian Poet Ghassan Zaqtan

Zaqtan will perform his poems in Arabic alongside his translator, Fady Joudah, who will read them in English.

Thursday, October 25, 2012
4:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA

Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of 10 collections of poetry. He is also a novelist, editor and filmmaker. He was born in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, and has lived in Jordan, Beirut, Damascus and Tunis. He returned to Palestine in the early 1990s and now lives in Ramallah. "Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me" is his ninth collection of poetry. He is one of the most important and original Palestinian poets of our time. His poems in this stirring collection invite us to explore them, exit them, map and un-map them, fill them up and empty them, with the living and non-living, the animate and inanimate, towards a true freedom.

Fady Joudah is a practicing physician of internal medicine and an award-winning poet and translator. Among his translations are two poetry collections by Mahmoud Darwish, "If I Were Another" and "The Butterfly's Burden." He lives in Houston, Texas.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

For more information please contact

Johanna Romero
Tel: (310) 825-1181
romero@international.ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/cnes

Sponsor(s): Comparative Literature, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA Library, Dean of Humanities Fund, International Poets in Conversation, Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute's consortium tour