Description:

Please join the Middle East and North African Studies Program for this conversation with poet and translator Mona Kareem, moderated by Northwestern professor Justin Mann.

About the speaker

Mona Kareem is a writer, literary scholar and literary translator working between Arabic and English. Her 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 Abdulqadir will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Spring 2021. Her Arabic translation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred was released by Takween publishing in Fall 2020.

Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has taught at SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers University, Bronx Community College, and the University of Maryland at College Park. She has been an affiliated research fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin and Translator in Residence at Princeton University’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication and the Council of the Humanities.

She is the author of three poetry collections. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Kareem has held fellowships and residencies with Poetry International, the Arab-American National Museum, the Norwich Center, and Forum Transregionale Studien. She has been a featured writer at festivals and conferences in Cairo, Istanbul, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Seoul, Copenhagen, and across the United States.

About the moderator

Justin L. Mann is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern. His research and teaching interests include African American literature, speculative fiction, black feminist theory and queer of color critique, and security studies. His current project, “Breaking the World: Blackness and Insecurity after the New World Order,” explores the interpenetration of speculative fiction and security policy to understand the underexamined connections between these two seemingly disparate fields of writing.

Bringing works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin into conversation with security policy and practice, “Breaking the World” argues that that black speculation is an overlooked but essential archive for understanding America’s security ambition since the Reagan administration. His work has appeared in Feminist Theory, Feminist Studies, and Surveillance & Society. His research has been supported by the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.

Register for this event:

https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtduCurz8vHNd09X5k1VdrmBoNHyJyNkSb