Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - 6:30pm
Irreverent Litanies: In Zack Rogow’s new poetry collection Irreverent Litanies, the poet grapples with religion and spirituality from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in a militantly atheist home. He surprises himself by sometimes finding the wisdom and beauty in a meditative perspective. With laugh-out-loud humor and deep heart, these poems offer new perspectives on contemporary life, from cloning Mozart to traffic bottlenecks in Silicon Valley to the cycles of birth and death.
Song of a Captive Bird: This novel portrays the life of trailblazing Iranian poet Forugh Farrokzhad. At age eleven, young Forugh began writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father—and satisfy her own passion for words. At sixteen, trapped in a suffocating marriage, she ran away and fell into a passionate love affair which increased her creative wingspan and her thirst for freedom and independence. Regarded as both a rebel and a national treasure, Forugh persevered, living by her own rules, at the cost of love, friendship, and eventually her own life, cut tragically short at the age of thirty-two, amid the violent upheaval of the budding Iranian revolution.
BIOS
Jasmin Darznik was born in Tehran, Iran, and moved to America when she was five years old. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her work has been published in thirteen countries and recognized by the Steinbeck Fellows Program, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the William Saroyan International Prize. Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Now a professor of literature and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in Northern California with her family.
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His new book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, will be published in 2019 by Regal House. Rogow’s other books of poetry include Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music from Kattywompus Press. His play Colette Uncensored (coauthored with Lorri Holt) will run at Cerimon House in Portland, Oregon, during the AWP conference in March 2019. The play had its first public reading at the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2015; was performed at The Marsh in San Francisco/Berkeley in 2016–17, and in London at the Canal Café Theatre in 2018. Rogow is the editor of an anthology of poetry of the U.S.A., The Face of Poetry, from University of California Press. He has taught in several MFA creative writing programs, and serves as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.
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