PALESTINIAN POET Rafeef Ziadah and American poet Patricia Smith will join journalist and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary for a night of poetry and discussion at the Town Hall Theatre as part of Cúirt.
Rafeef Ziadah is a spoken word artist and human rights activist based in London. Her poetry deals with war, exile, gender and racism. She is best known for the poems ‘We Teach Life, Sir’ and ‘Shades of Anger’, videos for which have gone viral online.
Her poetry is often accompanied by music and she has released two albums to date - her debut Hadeel, and more recently We Teach Life, recorded with Australian guitarist and producer Phil Monsour. She regularly conducts spoken word workshops and was chosen to represent Palestine at the South Bank Centre Poets Olympiad in 2012.
Race is also a key theme for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Patricia Smith. Her latest poetry collection, Incendiary Art, deals with violence against African American men and the grief of mothers. One sequence deals with the murder of Emmett Till, an African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14. The collection ranges from prose poems to sestinas to sonnets. Smith is winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2018 NAACP Image Award.
The event takes place on Friday April 12 at 8pm and is part of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature. For tickets contact the Town Hall Theatre (091 - 569777, www.tht.ie ). It will also be recorded for broadcast on RTÉ Radio. The full Cúirt programme will be announced on Friday March 8.
