Virtual Little Grassy Literary Festival 2021 features readings, discussions
Tactical Navigation
by Pete Rosenbery
CARBONDALE, Ill. The venerable Little Grassy Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University Carbondale will take on a different twist this year while still featuring a variety of renowned literary authors.
This year’s event, which begins Monday, April 5, and runs through April 9, will feature six authors and six poets who will read their work during 5 p.m. readings every night. There will also be three 11 a.m. panels where the audience can ask authors how they created their work or how they became successful writers. An open mic is set for 7 to 9 p.m. April 9 for anyone interested in sharing their work.
Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily. In 2017, Saddiq was a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska where he is currently studying for a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
INTRODUCTION
As a writer, dedicated to a life of writing, reading nudges you to invest a profound relationship with books which shows up as a deep level of respect for the writer’s effort, since the toil of producing a work of art is one that you relate with intimately. This also trains us to see the world through another’s eyes, since we are constrained to the limitations of our perspectives, and thus the world becomes a medley of varying stories that we acknowledge to be legitimate since we’ve now experienced it in the writing of others. Traveling is a way to see the world, reading is a way to travel while staying put in your comfort space without the physical fatigue of the violence of having to move your body to the spaces you want your
a parent’s pain
. To read your collection is to visit, as you put it, “where pain lives.”
In “Scarf,” the speaker writes, “
He wishes grief were a cloth he could take off.” Why is poetry the most appropriate means for you to contemplate grief?
Saddiq Dzukogi: Thank you so much for your generous words about the collection. I find it immensely difficult to talk about the book, but I guess I am at that stage where it becomes necessary since the book’s release date is around the corner.
Poetry has always been a tool for me to make sense of my body and the various emotions that it experiences and endures. I fall back to poetry each time there is something about the world or the self I do not understand. Not that it always arms me with understanding, but at least it starts the journey. When I started writing the poems, it was a way to get rage out of my veins. I wrote because crying wasn’t enough, my body wanted to bleed, I wanted to see my blood and the wo
Hafsa Zayyan is a writer and dispute resolution lawyer based in London. She won the inaugural #Merky Books New Writers Prize in 2019. We Are All Birds of Uganda is her debut novel, inspired by the mixed background from which she hails. She studied Law at the University of Cambridge and holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford. (Penguin Random House)
We have been under one or another form of state-imposed lockdown since March 2020.
Here, we have found new ways of escaping while staying inside.
Having had most of last year to settle into the new normal, many have resolved to spend more time reading so here’s a set of African titles to look forward to in 2021.