Launch of rumi roaming

Join us for the Toronto launch of rumi roaming, with editors gita hashemi and Elena Basile, and contributors Trish Salah, charles c. smith, and Zainab Amadahy!

rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions juxtaposes new translations of some of Rumi’s ghazals with contemporary creative non-fiction, poetry, scholarly essays, photo essays, and performance and art videos that engage with his work through decolonial reflections on language, human relations, connections to land and water, and spirituality. Join curator and editor gita hashemi, poetry and translation editor Elena Basile, and three of the contributors Zainab Amadahy, Trish Salah, and charles c. smith who will discuss and read from the book and screen some of the anthology’s media content.

Gita Hashemi is a refugee, an artist, activist, curator, and writer who works from T’karonto, the territory covered by the “Dish With One Spoon” wumpum belt agreement. She lives near Wonscotonach (aka Don) River. Her home in Shiraz was near Khoshk River. She has created and curated many generative and multi-platform projects, and was for many years on the editorial committee of Fuse Magazine. rumi roaming is her first anthology.

Elena Basile, born and raised in Italy to an English mother and an Italian father, writes, researches, and teaches in Tkaronto, Treaty 13. She has spent most of her life writing about the entangled layers of language, culture and place that make belonging possible, collaborating with artists and writers along the way. She is currently working on decolonizing her own approach.

charles c. smith has written and edited sixteen books. He studied poetry with William Packard at New York University, edited three collections of poetry, and his poetry has appeared in Poetry Canada Review, the Quill and Quire, Descant, Dandelion, Fiddlehead and others. His recent books include: travelogue of the bereaved (2014), whispers (2014), destination out (2018), and searching for eastman (2021).

Trish Salah is the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. Her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. An associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and has guest edited special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Arc Poetry Magazine.

Zainab Amadahy lives in Nogojiwanong, Ontario, Canada and has authored works of fiction and nonfiction including Wielding the Force (2012), Resistance (2013) and Life on Purpose (2017), and published in magazines including Muskrat. Now semi-retired, she has worked in community arts, not-for-profit housing, Indigenous knowledge reclamation, women’s services, and migrant settlement.