Zohra Saed: Recent Episodes
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Online Generative Writing Workshop
Jumpstart your poem, short story, or essay in our memory, food, and writing course. The prompts you receive will be centered on prompts with themes in food and memory. We will have a small community to write through grief, memory, food, and trauma. You will have a small PDF of poetry and sample essays to listen to and read as part of the packet. A syllabus. Guided meditation. Writing collaboratively. With a final reading of your writing.
Course length 4 Tuesdays / 2 hours in length / 7:30pm – 9:30pm EST
Nov. 28 / Dec 5 / Dec 12 / Dec 19
Cost: $250 per student
*Two spots open for those who cannot afford the fee.
For inquiries email: zohrasaed at gmail.com
Register here: https://forms.gle/u68zWviA4z8KTjseA
PayPal and Zelle Options available via email correspondence.
List of Talks, Publications, and Performances Summer/Fall 2022 SilkRoad Literary Festival Sept 17, 2022 https://www.crowdcast.io/e/talk-langston-hughes-in/1 Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts “Prologue to Collapsed Star” and “Longings” Translated from the Turkmen by Orhan Elmaz and Zohra Saed Special Feature: A Place, Here Guest Editor: Madhu Kaza http://texas.gulfcoastmag.org/journal/34.2-summer/fall-2022/ “Prologue from Collapsed Star” and […]
i joined the faculty at macaulay Honors College this year!!! TED x CUNY: An Intertwining of Voices: Langston, Shaali and Karim Episode Two. Zohra Saed on Langston Hughs’s visit to Soviet Turkestan in 1932-1933 on Central Asia Inside/Out Leaving and loving Afghanistan on Poetry Foundation POdcast Afghan, Afghan American, Afghan Again and Again on AAWW […]
A Year in Review:
In this most difficult year, I managed a few moments of joy in writing. I took some risks in writing in fiction. I incorporated love into my pedagogy. And I made some beautiful friends in these tense and transformative times. May we all be safe and protected in these most frightening times. It has also been a time of great honesty and truth telling. A time to be vigilant of authority and racial injustice and a time to come together to work towards equity. The Black Lives Matter movement was the most heart opening, transformative series of protest movements this year. I saw it impact my family, my students, and my colleagues, my diaspora in such a profound way. May we all continue in that spirit of radical love.
Here are a few highlights:
December 2020
This panel on Turkic identity in Afghanistan curated by Said Sabir Ibrahimi was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had. I don’t think I did much to contribute to the conversation other than anecdotes, but I learned a great deal from the most erudite, Moheb Mudessir.
October 12, 2020
I was excited to give a talk on my work at the American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan. It was quite an experience and I enjoyed meeting the students.
The Creative Writing Club: Author Talk with Dr. Zohra Saed
October 6, 2020
I read my poem about my father’s visit to walnut forest in Nangarhar to the great Dr. Vandana Shiva and other amazing seed activists at: Satyagraha: Gardens as Acts of Resistance. Hosted by Brooklyn Rail.
April 2020
Tinderbox Poetry Journal nominated my poem “Sister of my Spine, Wearing War behind One Ear” for the Best New Poets list. This meant a great deal to me since it was the first time I was able to articulate the death of my cousin in Kabul.
On April 24, I was on a panel with the incredible poet, LaTasha N. Diggs:
Film Screening and Talk: Made in Harlem with LaTasha Nevada Diggs and Zohra Saed
The sumptuous Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989, 60 min.) streams on Twitter at 4:00PM, with discussion to follow with Zohra Saed, LaTasha Diggs, & Poets House program director Paolo Javier. The post-screening discussion focuses on poetry, collective memory, and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance in the political and artistic imagination of Harlem poets today.
I got to speak about Langston Hughes’ trip to Soviet Central Asia and the connections he made there.
February 11, 2020
My last event at a space with people in the audience was: Ticket to Afghanistan with the Alignist Book club. The even was with Nadia Hashimi and Elhan Fanous hosted by Beenish Ahmed. Here I met the amazing women who came together to form an Afghan book club. This was a lifesaver during quarantine.
This year, I had the luxury of focusing on my craft as a writer. Here are some of the brilliant writers I had the good fortune of taking fiction classes with: Lara Elena Donnelly “Taking on Tropes in Science Fiction & Fantasy” [Catapult, Summer 2019] Delaney Nolan “Fiction Workshop: Beginnings and Endings” [Catapult, Fall 2019] […]
Reviews: One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature, ed. by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi. Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2010. $24.95. This anthology chronicles the recent work of the Afghan diaspora in the United States, which has received newfound attention in the wake of 9/11 and the success […]
My poem, part of a series on Afghan cities “Secret Lives of Misspelled Cities,” was published in The Massachusetts Review. VOLUME 59, ISSUE 4 IN THE EDITORS’ preface to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong issued a provocative “shot across the bows” aimed at the […]
On April 20th at 3:30pm join the Sheyr Jangi team to play with poetry and be a part of the joyous history this Central Asian, Middle Eastern, Persian, and South Asian tradition! We will be challenging each other with improv poetry drawn from special deck of poetry Sahar and I edited and created which features […]
Hughes Kraft, “Ouzbek Woman” 1880 The spirit of defiance in this nineteenth century photograph is palpable. This reminds me of the photographs that the French took in Algeria in the same time period. There is a challenge in these expressions. There are more expressions like this in the women of the rest of Turkestan: Kyrgyz, […]
In September, Belladonna did a wonderful thing and published a small chaplet of my poetry. Many friends are aware that I have been intrigued in myth making and in resurrecting Central Asian woman heroes. This stems from my childhood immersed in fairy tales, my father’s stories, and my adulthood fascinated by all things magical and […]
A new chaplet of poems and a reading with the talented Mina Zohal, moderated by the brilliant Youmna Chlala will take place on Sept. 11 at Abrons Art Center. Do join us!
Some wonderful updates for my dissertation (now being transformed into a book) on Langston Hughes in Turkestan. Interview with Leonard Schwartz on Cross-Cultural Poetics about the research process: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/353-364/XCP-2017/XCP_364_Zohra-Saed_12-6-2016.mp3 In April, I had the good fortune of pairing with Leonard Schwartz for Apex Art’s Double Take #21 ____________________________ Thanks to editors R.A. Villanueva and Colin […]
2016 was the year I decided that writing in silence would no longer do. My writer’s block was the only thing I was hearing in my silent little nook that overlooks a busy street in Brooklyn. So, I followed my Turko-Persian love for birds, and brought home ten little budgies and set up a full […]