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Cities Outside Sentences: Saretta Morgan, Youmna Chlala, Mirene Arsanios & Christina Olivares

 

Christina Olivares is the author of No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, and of the chaplet Interrupt, published by Belladonna* Collaborative. Her second book is forthcoming from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a BRIO Award in Nonfiction, a LMCC Workspace Residency, and two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants. Olivares is a queer Cuban-American poet and educator from the Bronx in New York City.

Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut and currently based in New York. Her poetry collection, The Paper Camera, is forthcoming from Litmus Press. She is a recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Her writing appears in publications such as Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, CURA, MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, Bahithat: Journal of Lebanese Women Researchers and XCP: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics. She is the co-founder of the Mutating Cities Institute and a Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing Departments at the Pratt Institute.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to VidaThe Brooklyn Raile-flux journal, and The Rumpus, among others. She edits Makhzin, a bilingual magazine for innovative writing and teaches at Pratt Institute. On Friday nights you can find her at the Poetry Project where she coordinates the FridayNight reading series with Rachel Valinsky.

Saretta Morgan uses text and objects to consider relationships of narrative form and privacy. She has received fellowships and awards from the Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and Arizona Commission on the Arts, among others. She is the author of room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017), Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and the forthcoming collection Plan Upon Arrival (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour). She holds a BA from Columbia University, and MFA from Pratt Institute and teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. 

Photography credits: Ruth Höflich, from The Problem of Outcomes (2016).