Geneffa Jahan hosts San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil as he shares how he became an organizer after the 2007 bombing of Al Mutanabbi Street, the famed booksellers’ street of Baghdad. They discuss his global movement, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, with annual readings worldwide to commemorate the bombing, and his anthology of poems and prose by survivors and witnesses, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (2012). Beausoleil reads two poems, written as letters to Iraq, and one poem he wrote for his collaborative photojournalism project, Shadow & Light, honoring the 324 Iraqi Academics murdered between 2003 and 2012. With 57 participants from Jordan to Egypt, Iran, the US, the UK, and Canada, the project ensures that “the protest does not go home,” to quote Beausoleil, “but lives on as a project of witness, memory, and solidarity.”

Beau Beausoleil is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently, Another Way Home (Bluelight Press, 2022) and two chapbooks: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023).