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An evening of poetry and conversation with Ahmad Almallah and Kevin Platt.

Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems Bitter English is available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press, 2019. His new book Border Wisdom was published in September 2023 with Winter Editions. He received the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems and other writing appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Great River Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry and American Poetry Review. Some of his work in Arabic has appeared in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. He is currently Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kevin M.F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work focuses on Russian and East European poetry, culture, and history and global socialist culture. His translations of Russian poetry have appeared in World Literature Today, Jacket2, n+1, Fence, and other journals. He is the author or editor of several scholarly books, the most recent of which is Global Russian Cultures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). He has also edited and contributed translations to a number of books of Russian poetry in English translation, most recently Verses on the Vanguard: Russian Poetry Today (Deep Vellum, 2021), F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (Isolarii, 2020), and Orbita: The Project (Arc Publications, 2018). His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders, is forthcoming from Cornell University/Northern Illinois University Press.