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The Social Impact of the Writer (with Poupeh Missaghi): Trans(re)lation, Fragmentation, and Importance of Asking Questions

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Join poet, editor, and translator Poupeh Missaghi as well as Ad Aster hosts Emma and Celina to reflect on her work. We discuss Missaghi’s book trans(re)lating house one, what it means to be a writer and reporter during times of violence and crisis, and how to subvert traditional narratives of backwardness and victimhood with aesthetics, form, and emphasis of questions over answers.


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  1. What is the role of the writer or artist in times of turmoil and crisis?
  2. What does it mean to translate(re)late? What should we keep in mind when joining together stories?
  3. What is lost in creating content for the “other”? How does one subvert expectations of “traumaporn” and victimhood in marginalized literature through questions, aesthetics, and form?
  4. What is the relationship between searching for the truth and searching for how to tell the truth? In what ways can fragmentation reveal a more accurate truth?
  5. What is the strength in revisiting questions and open ended text, in intentional form and style? How do we ask questions when we know there isn’t an answer? Is reporting/writing/exploration just a labyrinth of stories?
  6. How can young writers and artists explore and create for positive social change?


    7. Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, translator, and editor. Her debut book trans(re)lating house one (Coffee House Press, 2020) is a hybrid investigation of the role of the witness through the frame of the 2009 protests in Iran. her second book Sound Museum, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2024, investigates the history of global torture enterprise. her translation of Nasim Marashi’s I’ll be Strong for You was published in 2021 (Astra House), and she has two other translation books forthcoming in 2023 and 2024. An assistant professor of literary arts and studies at the University of Denver and a faculty mentor at Pacific Northwest College of Art MFA, she is currently based in Denver, Colorado.


    links

    ⁠trans(re)lating house one

    Poupeh Missaghi - Words Without Borders

    Mapping Tehran

    Visual Spotlight: Some Artists on Developing a New Visual Language of Protest

    The Many Voices of the Displaced

    Nowruz Journal 



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