Poetry Reading by Tarfia Faizullah

Join the Department of English for a poetry reading by Tarfia Faizullah for her first book of poetry, “Seam.”

Faizullah lived in Dhaka on a Fulbright fellowship, where she interviewed women rape survivors of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. The nine-month war had between 300,000 and 3 million dead and between 200,000 and 400,000 victims of mass rape. Faizullah’s work led Harvard Law School to name her to its 2016 list of “50 Women Inspiring Change.”

Her second book, “Registers of Illuminated Villages,” is more personal, focusing on questions of identity and living between cultures. Her parents are Bangladeshi immigrants, and she grew up in Texas. Yet, in this book, violence and war creep in and cast a shadow. In the poem “Register of Eliminated Villages,” the speaker’s night is interrupted by “a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in Northern Iraq.”

Faizullah is this year’s judge of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.