Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me: Ghassan Zaqtan with Fady Joudah

Please note that due to a delay in receiving a visa to travel to the United States, Ghassan Zaqtan will not be able to join us at this event. Fady Joudah will read from, and discuss, his translations of Zaqtan’s poems, and a video of Zaqtan will be presented.

The author of many collections in Arabic, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan reads from and discusses his visceral, narrative poetics with fellow poet and translator Fady Joudah.

Fady Joudah is a poet and translator of Arabic. His collection, Earth in the Attic (2008) won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He translated Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems, which was just published by Yale University Press. He also translated two collections of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, If I Were Another (2009), which won the PEN USA Literary Award, and The Butterfly’s Burden (2006). He lives in Houston where he is a practicing physician.

Ghassan Zaqtan is a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and a poet. Of his ten collections of Arabic poetry, Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems (2012) is the first translated into English. He is the director of the House of Poetry in Ramallah and the Director General of the Literature and Publishing Department of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. He is also editor of the literature supplement of the Palestinian daily newspaper al-Ayyam. He lives in Ramallah.