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We warmly invite you to join us for a reading and conversation with Iranian poets and translators Armen Davoudian and Dr. Fatemeh Shams hosted by Julieta Vittore Dutto. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet, Shams is an intersectional feminist activist and Associate Professor of Persian literature at Penn. Her latest publication, translated to English from Persian by Davoudian, is Hopscotch, in which she crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Shams’s poetry invites us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.
Davoudian is the author of the debut poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian's magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art's reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.
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Masks are welcome. Please stay home if you feel ill.
ARMEN DAVOUDIAN
Armen Davoudian grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House) and the translator, from the Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse). His poems appear in the Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review. He is a PhD candidate in English and a Next Generation Scholar Fellow at Stanford University, where he is writing a dissertation titled "Metanoia: How Poets Change Their Minds.”
FATEMEH SHAMS
Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, 2016), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry magazine, PBS NewsHour, World Literature Today, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
JULIETA VITTORE DUTTO
Julieta Vittore Dutto is a poet from Córdoba, Argentina. Her first collection of poetry Un lugar interminable [An Endless Place] was published by Editorial Mascarón de Proa in 2022. Her poems appear in Circumference Magazine, AYMAG, La Guacha, and Un Mundo en Llamas. She currently lives in Philadelphia and is pursuing a PhD in Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
LOCATION: Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on Penn's campus