Talk | Politics of Poetics: Solmaz Sharif and Wafaa Bilal

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Politics of Poetics is a series of readings and workshops that highlights influential contemporary poets whose practices traverse the political through writing, teaching, and activism. This summer, Solmaz Sharif—winner of the 2017 American Book Award for poetry for her book Look—joins artist Wafaa Bilal for a reading and conversation on shared themes in their work, including investigations of contemporary warfare and its aftermath involving the US, Iran, and Iraq.

This event follows an earlier workshop with Sharif.

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CART captioning is provided. To request additional accessibility services like ASL interpretation or audio description, please contact us via email at Accessibility@mcachicago.org or call 312-397-4076.

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Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal is known internationally for his online, performative, and interactive works provoking dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. Bilal’s work explores tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies—his home in the comfort zone of the United States and his consciousness in the “conflict zone” in Iraq. In 2008, the Chicago Tribune named him Artist of the Year. That same year, City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, a book about Bilal’s life and Domestic Tension. His artwork is featured in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; and Mathaf: and Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; among others. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was conferred an honorary doctorate from DePauw University. Bilal is currently an Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. Sharif is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley.