Poetry as Storytelling — A Conversation with Nathalie Handal

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary community to explore the intersection of two research agendas (1) thematically, the study of violence and insecurity, broadly-understood; and (2) methodologically, the theory and practice of varied forms of story-telling as a way of accessing and expressing lived experience and human understanding. We plan to sponsor events related to producing and publishing story-telling, scholarly discussions about the lived experience of violence and insecurity, and interdisciplinary explorations of the nexus between story-telling and violence. We also plan to organize opportunities for workshop members to give and receive feedback on works-in-progress. If you are a Northwestern faculty member or graduate students would like to join the working group, please send an email to Foroogh Farhang at ForooghFarhang2015@u.northwestern.edu.

NATHALIE HANDAL’s published collections include Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award and a Foreword Indies Book Award finalist, and The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence. Handal is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian. Her plays have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in London. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, on PBS, and NPR. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Pen International Croatia Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature.