Literature & Resistance: Poetry Reading with Éireann Lorsung, Majed Mujed, and Hua Xi

Recorded November 21, 2023.

Literature & Resistance: Poetry Reading with Éireann Lorsung, Majed Mujed, and Hua Xi

Hosted by the Centre for Resistance Studies and Poetry Ireland

Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Tuesday 21 November, 6pm

The Centre for Resistance Studies is delighted to be partnering again with Poetry Ireland to welcome three acclaimed poets for a special reading in our ongoing series on Literature & Resistance.

Éireann Lorsung, Majed Mujed, and Hua Xi will join us to read from and discuss their work. They will explore the nature of resistance in poetry, and how it informs their relationships with language, form, and translation, and reflect on their broader experiences with writing and poetry, which encompass journalism, teaching, and publishing, in the US, Iraq, and Ireland. Please join us for an evening of beautiful poetry and stimulating conversation on the politics and power of the written word.

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Éireann Lorsung will walk or take the bus or ride a bicycle; will crouch to look at the ground beneath her feet; will spend an hour thinking with you on how a poem works and come back tomorrow to ask again; will watch the light change and the small plants arrive. She loves to make things with other people in the “location of possibility” that the classroom is. She teaches writing at University College Dublin, and is learning about fruit cultivation, gull behavior, the wild and domestic plants of Ireland, and climate change alongside others in the city. A 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, her most recent collection is The Century (Milkweed, 2020).

Majed Mujed was born in Iraq in 1971 and has lived in Ireland since 2015. One of the founders of the Iraqi House of Poetry, he worked as a journalist and publisher in the Iraqi cultural press for twenty years. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic and has garnered awards for his work from the Al Mada Cultural Foundation, Iraqi House of Wisdom and Iraqi Intellectuals Conference. In 2021, he was one of the inaugural recipients of a Play It Forward Fellowship from the Arts Council of Ireland. His collection The Book of Trivialities, originally written in his native Arabic, was translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by Skein Press in 2023. It was selected by the Arts Council for the #ReadMór project for Culture Night 2023.

Majed will be joined by the translator and interpreter Mustafa Keshkeia, who is currently working on a PhD on crisis translation at DCU.

Hua Xi (she/they) is the Poetry Ireland Eavan Boland Emerging Artist Awardee for 2023. A writer and artist, their work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. They previously won the Boston Review Poetry Contest, were named the 2022 Poet-to-Come Scholar by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, and received a 2023 NEA Fellowship in Poetry. They help edit interviews at Guernica and read poetry for The Drift.