Join The Georgia Review and Lostintheletters for a reading not to be missed. Brandon Som will read from his 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Tripas, whose poems are built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in celebration of his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Siwar Masannat will read from cue, an ekphrastic collection that responds to artist Akram Zaatari’s excavation of studio portraits by Hashem El Madani, captured between the 1940s and 1970s in the Lebanese town of Saida. cue’s intertextual experiments and lyric poems pose questions about privacy and visibility, love and family, gender, and ecological agency. This reading will be part of the Asian American Literature Festival, a festival running in September with coordinated events happening across the world. RSVPs to this event are highly encouraged.
Brandon Som’s Tripas was also a finalist for the National Book Award. His first book, The Tribute Horse, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives on the unceded land of the Kumeyaay Nation and is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.
Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer. 50 Water Dreams, her debut poetry collection, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Competition. Managing editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner, Masannat currently works at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Most recently, Masannat’s writing appeared in Mïtra: Revue d’art et de littérature, 7iber, Fence, and Lana Turner, among others.
Lositntheletters was founded as a reading series in 2012 that featured authors from Atlanta and the Southeast. In 2013, they created the inaugural Letters Festival to build a bridge between Atlanta and the national writing community. Lostintheletters currently hosts the quarterly Reading & Workshop Series, annual Letters Festival, and Saturday Studio Hours, an intentional space where anyone can write, read, revise, and pursue any other activity to push their practices forward.
