What the World’s Silence Says: A Reading with Poet Yahya Ashour
February 22, 2024
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
101 Taft Hall, Arab American Cultural Center
Address
826 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FilePoetry and Storytelling with Gazan poet, Yahya Ashour
Join us for poetry ready and conversation with Yahya Ashour, a poet from Gaza.
Yahya Ashour was born in Gaza, Palestine. He published two books in Arabic, “That’s Why Ryan Walks This way” (a Children’s book) and “You’re a Window, They’re Clouds” (a poetry collection). His children’s book won the Arab Children’s Books Publishers Forum Award in 2022. Yahya will be a resident of the International City of Arts in Paris, France from March to May 2024. He is an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and a 2022 Fall Resident of the International Writing Program there. He was the youngest poet to be featured in the anthology of Palestinian Poetry Today which featured poets born between the 1970s and the 1990s, edited and translated by the renowned French-Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laabi. Yahya worked as a mentor for children and youth in creative writing and critical thinking at some of the most prominent organizations in Gaza, like Tamer, Qattan, Nawa, and Amideast. He earned a BA in Sociology/Psychology in 2020. He has survived six Israeli military aggressions in Gaza. During this war, his family's house of five floors and his family's business were destroyed and he lost one cousin and seven friends. His family of 19 was forced to flee to the south of Gaza and has been surviving under severe circumstances since the beginning of the war.
This event is co-sponsored by the UIC Arab American Cultural Center, Institute for the Humanities, Classics and Mediterranean Studies Department, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, and the Social Justice Institute.
Date posted
Feb 5, 2024
Date updated
Feb 8, 2024