Join the Department of English, in conjunction with the Department of History and the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, for a reading with Farnaz Fatemi from her debut poetry collection, Sister Tongue. Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American poet, editor, and writing teacher in Santa Cruz, California. Her debut book, Sister Tongue (Kent State University Press, 2022), won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (selected by Tracy K. Smith). Her poetry and prose appear in Poets.org (Poem-a-Day), Pedestal Magazine, Grist Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Tahoma Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, phren-z.org, and several anthologies. She was awarded the Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman Fellowship by Djerassi and has been honored by the International Literary Awards (Center for Women Writers), Poets on the Verge (Litquake SF), Best of the Net Nonfiction, and Pushcart. The poems in Sister Tongue explore negative spaces — the distance between twin sisters, between lovers, between Farsi and English, between the poet’s upbringing in California and her family in Iran. Fatemi offers us a vision of a porosity of self and reveals how connections between people and places might be forged. This reading is free and open to the public. Q&A and book signing to follow. Books will be available for sale from Barnes and Noble. For Credit: Take a picture of yourself at the event and send a short reflection to apo.leadership.ai@gmail.com talking about the event and what you learned/took away from it.