Join The Georgia Review and UGA Press, in partnership with The Georgia Museum of Art, to celebrate recent books in our Georgia Review Books imprint. 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.
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.
Requests for accommodations for those with disabilities should be made as soon as possible but at least 7 days prior to the scheduled event. To request an accommodation please notify Aria Curtis at garev@uga.edu.
The Georgia Review, an award-winning literary journal that publishes original poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews, as well as visual art, was founded at the University of Georgia in 1947. Visit thegeorgiareview.com for further information.
The University of Georgia Press is the oldest and largest book publisher in the state, with a long history of publishing significant scholarship, creative and literary works, and books about the state and the region for general readers. Learn more at ugapress.org.