[VIRTUAL] PEN Out Loud: Solmaz Sharif with Kaveh Akbar

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This is a free event.

National Book Award finalist Solmaz Sharif joins PEN Out Loud to discuss her second poetry collection, Customs. Examining the “culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—”the collection of poems “trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination.” Sharif will be in conversation with poet Kaveh Akbar.

This digital event will start at 8pm ET / 5pm PT.

Presented in collaboration with Strand Book Store and Scripps Presents.

ASL interpretive services are provided by ProBono ASL.

Books are provided by the Huntley Bookstore of the Claremont Colleges.

Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs and Look, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in Granta, The New Republic, and Poetry. She teaches at Arizona State University.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017). Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

About Strand Book Store

Located on 12th and Broadway in New York City, the Strand Book Store is a family-owned, iconic literary destination with more than 90 years of history and 18 miles of books to prove it. Its events feature some of today’s most interesting and provocative authors. Its unparalleled inventory of 2.5 million new, used, and rare books and locally designed totes, gifts, and apparel makes it easy and exciting to get lost in the stacks.

About Scripps Presents

Scripps Presents is an electrifying mix of storytellers and artists, policymakers and musicians—and everything in between. Based at Scripps College, Scripps Presents provides a forum the Claremont Colleges and audiences across Southern California to engage with eye-opening, mind-bending, genre-defying tête-à-têtes with the thinkers and doers, writers and performers, whose passions and perspectives are changing the way we see the world.

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.