October 12, 2020

A Mizna Reading at Dodge Poetry Festival

by Lamia Abukhadra | in Literary

Mizna brings together a powerful slate of today’s most compelling Muslim and Southwest Asian and North African poets for the 2020 Dodge Poetry Festival: Tarik Dobbs, Ifrah Mansour, Sagirah Shahid, and Moheb Soliman.

Mizna is a critical space for Arab and SWANA literature, film, and art. We publish Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America. For twenty years, we have sought to reflect the depth and multiplicity of our community and have been committed to being a space for Arab, Muslim, and other artists from the region to reclaim our narratives and engage audiences in meaningful and artistically excellent art.

When: Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 11 am-12pm CDT
Where: Online, Virtual 2020 Dodge Poetry Festival
Passes to Dodge Poetry Fest are available here

Author Bios

Tarik Dobbs is an Arab American, queer writer born in Dearborn, MI. Dobbs’s poems appear soon in American Poetry Review, AGNI, & Mizna. Dobbs is winner of the 2020 Peseroff Prize & the 2nd Place 2020 Palette Poetry Spotlight Award.

Ifrah Mansour is a Somali, refugee, Muslim, multimedia artist and an educator based in Minnesota. Her artwork explores trauma through the eyes of children to uncover the resiliencies of blacks, Muslims, and refugees. She interweaves poetry, puppetry, films, and installations. She’s been featured in Middle East Eye, BBC, Vice, OkayAfrica, Star Tribune, and City Pages. Her critically-acclaimed, “How to Have Fun in a Civil War” premiered at Guthrie Theatre and toured to greater cities in Minnesota. Her first national museum exhibition; “Can I touch it” premiered at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her visual poem, “I am a Refugee” is part of PBS’s short Film festival. “My Aqal, banned and blessed” Premiered at Queens Museum in New York.

Sagirah Shahid is a Black American Muslim writer and educator from Minneapolis, MN.  She is a recipient of a Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series award in poetry and is a featured artist in Shangri La’s American Muslim Futures exhibit . Sagirah is one of the curators of the Sunflower Room, a Facebook group devoted to shared communal art and self-expression. Her debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest. He has presented writing, performance, installation, and video work at diverse literary, art, and public spaces in the US and Canada with support from the Banff Centre, Pillsbury House, Joyce Foundation, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and others. Moheb has degrees from The New School and the University of Toronto and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His first poetry book, HOMES, coming summer 2021 through Coffee House Press, intertwines issues of place, identity, and sublimity in the natural-cultural sprawl of the Great Lakes.