Calling all Seattleites! Join Rajiv Mohabir for a reading at The Elliott Bay Book Company celebrating the paperback release of his gorgeous, award-winning memoir Antiman. The winner of our 2019 Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Antiman explores the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped Rajiv’s experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States.

Rajiv will be in conversation with Iraqi novelist, filmmaker, and visual artist, Mortada Gzar. Gzar’s memoir, I’m in Seattle, Where are You? (2021), translated by William Hutchins, interweaves tales of his childhood work as a scrap-metal collector in a war zone and the indignities faced by openly gay artists in Iraq with his impossible love story and journey to the US.

This event is in-person. RSVP here.

When: September 7 at 7pm PDT
Where: The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of Cutlish (2021, Four Way Books, finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award), The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His essays can be found in places like the Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an assistant professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College. His debut memoir, Antiman, won the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Mortada Gzar is an Iraqi novelist, filmmaker, and visual artist. Born in Kuwait in 1982, he has an engineering degree from the University of Baghdad, and has been a resident at the Iowa International Writers’ Workshop. He has written, directed, and produced several films that have screened at international festivals. His animated short film Language won the Doha Film Award. He is the author of three novels: Broom of Paradise (2008), Sayyid Asghar Akbar (2013), and My Beautiful Cult (2016), and is a regular contributor to the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir al-Arabiandis. His memoir, I’m in Seattle, Where are You?, was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.