FRESH AND BEST! Poetry Series -- feat. Solmaz Sharif
DIESEL, A Bookstore welcomes Solmaz Sharif to the store on Friday, July 15th at 7pm as part of the FRESH AND BEST poetry reading series. This month we are featuring the release of Solmaz's new and acclaimed debut collection, Look (Graywolf Press). She will be joined in conversation with D.A. Powell. Come see what booksellers are already raving about (Look is also a July IndieNext selection), and join us for an evening of poetry, community, and beverages!
Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
D. A. POWELL is the author of numerous collections, including most recently Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys and Repast. He teaches at the University of San Francisco and lives in the Bay Area.
July 2016 IndieNext Selection
“Sharif’s first poetry collection tells the story of the punishing legacy that enduring warfare can have on a family. She expertly utilizes language lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to demonstrate how we have sanitized the language of warfare into something more benign and seemingly less deadly. The essential task of poetry is to engender empathy and to speak truth to power; to that end, Look succeeds in spades.” —Matt Keliher, SubText: A Bookstore, St. Paul, MN