Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/11/2020
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location
Community Bookstore
Categories No Categories
Join us for a reading and conversation with author Poupeh Missaghi, to discuss her hybrid new work, trans(re)lating house one. She will be joined in conversation by Adrian Shirk.
Disappearing statues, missing protestors, inexplicable death – how does a writer account for Tehran’s shifting vanishing points?
In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection—teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars—her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language?
Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew. Missaghi incorporates documentary methods, reportage, and critical theory, reinventing the way we look at storytelling and what it can do.
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, a translator both into and out of Persian, Asymptote’s Iran editor-at-large, and an educator. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver and an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her nonfiction, fiction, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and she has several books of translation published in Iran. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.