SPEAKER FOR SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University.

Ali's poetry collections include The Far Mosque (2005), which won Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day (2008), Sky Ward (2013), and Inquisition (2018). Ali's poems, both lyric and musical, explore the intersection of faith and daily life. In a review of The Fortieth Day, Library Journal noted that Ali "continues his task of creating a rejuvenated language that longs to be liberated from the weight of daily routine and the power of dogmatic usage . . . writing in the tradition of  Wallace Stevens, Ali is clearly a poet of ideas and symbols, yet his words remain living entities within the texture of the poem."

  

His prose includes The Disappearance of Seth (2009), Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (2009), Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine (2015), and the essay collection Silver Road (2017). He is also the author of the novel Quinn's Passage (2005), which was named one of the Best Books of 2005 by Chronogram magazine.

  

In 2003 Ali co-founded Nightboat Books and served as the press's publisher until 2007. His newest books are The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017) and Anaïs Nin: An Unprofessional Study (Agape Editions, 2017).

  

He has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and his poetry has been featured in Best American Poetry. Ali has been a regular columnist for the American Poetry Review and a contributing editor for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs' Writer's Chronicle. He is a former member of the Cocoon Theatre Modern Dance Company.

  

Ali has taught at Oberlin College and the low-residency Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Charlotte Writers Club North presents Beyond Brushes and Pens, an ekphrastic workshop that invites writers to have a deeper dialogue between visual art and words, led by poet and teacher Terri Wolfe.

This workshop is in cooperation with Mooresville Arts, and will be held on Saturday, October 7, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Mooresville Arts Gallery, 103 West Center Avenue. The cost, which includes a $5 donation to the non-profit arts group, is $35 for CWC members, $45 for non-members.To register contact Caroline Kane Kenna. We hope you will join us for the first event of our program year.