Book Talk: And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, Part Two

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As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. Join us on YouTube Live for a free virtual talk with contributing authors from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, an anthology of literary dispatches from life during the pandemic.

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante’s Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future.

Net proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers get back on their feet after the lockdown. Purchase the anthology from Restless Books directly here.

While this program is free, you can donate to support future programming from the Tenement Museum here. 

When: Part Two: Tuesday August 18, 2020; 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm ET (Watch Part One Here)

Where: https://youtu.be/5PBUq8QEyeU

This program will continue to be available on our Youtube channel following the LIVE screening.

 

About the Speakers:

André Naffis-Sahely (Venice, Italy, 1985) is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020). His most recent translation is Aulò, Aulò, Aulò: Poems by Ribka Sibhatu, which received a PEN Translates award from English PEN in 2020. He is the 2020 Author in Residence at UCLA.

Jane Hirshfield (New York, New York, 1953) is the author of nine much-honored books of poetry, most recently Ledger (2020). She has also written two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and edited and co-translated four books collecting world poets of the past. Her poems regularly appear in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. 

Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appear in Brooklyn Rail, Ambit, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Kareem’s English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 and was reprinted by English PEN in 2017. Her selected translations of Iraqi poet Ra’ad Abdul Qader will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Spring 2021. She is currently translating Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Arabic, to be released by Takween publishing in Fall 2020.