Radical Poetry Reading with Mona Kareem

Mona Kareem curates the Brooklyn Rail’s 91st Radical Poetry Reading with Mirene Arsanios and Sara Elkamel.

Based in the United States, Mona Kareem (Kuwait, 1987) is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, the trilingual chapbook Femme Ghosts(Publication Studio). She is a recipient of a 2021 NEA literary grant and a fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. Her work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly Review,and many other publications. She has held fellowships with Princeton University, Poetry International, the Arab American National Museum, the Norwich Center for Writing, and Forum Transregionale Studien. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within and Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for This Unseen Thread.

Poet and journalist Sara Elkamel is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, among others. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She lives between her hometown Cairo and NYC.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), and more recently, Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2020). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday nights reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017-19. Her next book, The Autobiography of a Language, is forthcoming with Futurepoem (2021).

Sign up and find out more here.