Join us for a virtual Craft Class and Reading with Mariam Bazeed on Saturday, February 24th, 2024! This Craft Class is virtual and will run from 11:00 AM-1:00 PM and the reading from 1:00 PM.

Once you RSVP, you will receive a Zoom Link the day before the workshop. You will also have a chance to donate directly to the “tip jar.” All tips go directly to the instructor.

RSVP here

Once Upon a Pandemic: I attended a Zoom reading featuring Natalie Diaz, wherein she described some of her work as a native poet as a kind of writing through English, and the phrase stuck! In this generative workshop, we will consider poets whose work, though cloaked in English, challenges its archives, uncovers its erasures, and rewrites its invented histories through formal and semantic inter- and contraventions. I’ll prepare a packet including works by Jordan Abel, Jessica Abughattas, Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Marwa Helal, Noor Hindi, Cathy Park Hong, Noor Ibn Najam, and Layli Long Soldier, and we’ll discuss a subset to write from their prompt. For my reading, I’ll share some of my recent erasure and bilingual work, tracing the Arab as the Arab is effaced and erased in the landscape of American legacy media.

Mariam Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, poet, playwright, performance artist, actor, editor, translator, curator, and cook, living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed in festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Their first play, peace camp org, an autobiographical queer anti-Zionist musical(ish) comedy about summer camp, is published by Oberon Books, UK, and won them the Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award for creative promise in 2021. They are currently at work on their first novel, The Boy Made of Air, and on a new theatrical commission for Noor Theatre, NYC. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Mariam curates and runs an occasional world-music salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.