Event Title: A Reading & Conversation with Kaveh Akbar, Jos Charles, and Fady Joudah, Sponsored by Alice James Books and Milkweed Editions
Description: Three award-winning poets sharing their most recent work: In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared. In feeld, Jos Charles offers a lyrical unraveling of the circuity of gender and speech. In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar confronts addiction and the strenuous path of recovery, beginning with the wilds of the mind. Introduced and moderated by Victoria Chang.
Participants: Kaveh Akbar, Jos Charles, Fady Joudah
Location: Oregon Ballroom 201-202, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
Date & Time: Friday, March 29, 1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.

What book or books that you’ve read over the last year would you most highly recommend?
Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens, by Hosam Aboul-Ela, from Northwestern University Press. And Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing.

If you could run into any author, contemporary or historical, at #AWP19, who would it be and what would you talk about?
Since I was a teenager, I've wanted to speak with Malcolm X. I would love to talk with him about liberation at the personal level, and after departure from the earth. Although I'd be disappointed in him if he showed up at AWP. I'd also like to moderate a conversation between Cavafy and Ritsos. I'd like to walk around AWP with James Emanuel's poem "Deadly James" on loop through the speakers in the convention center (read by Emily Dickinson). I'd love for Chief Seattle to read to us his speech, there is no greater eulogy for the earth, no greater American eco-poem.

Fady Joudah is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, and previously The Earth in the Attic, Alight, and Textu, a book-long sequence of poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count. He has translated from Arabic the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Zaqtan, and others. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/TLS prize from the UK, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Houston where he practices internal medicine.
(Photo Credit: Cybele Knowles)