Please join us for the IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series!  This week’s event features IWP Residents Tabish Khair (Denmark) and Elena Salamanca (El Salvador), with Writers’ Workshop MFA student ko ko thett.

Tabish Khair is a fiction and nonfiction writer, journalist, poet, and academic. He is the author of Just Another Jihadi Jane, The Body by the Shore, Namaste Trump & Other Stories, and Literature Against Fundamentalism. An Indian citizen, he now resides in Denmark, where he teaches in the Department of English at the University of Aarhus. His residency is courtesy of the Paul and Hualing Nieh Engle Fund.

Elena Salamanca is a poet, historian, fiction writer, and art curator. She is the author of several multidisciplinary books of poetry, fiction, and scholarly historical work. She has published three bilingual editions of her poetry: Tal vez monstruos [Monsters Maybe], Landsmoder, and La familia o el olvido [Family or Oblivion]. She is the creator, author, researcher, and co-coordinator of the collection SIEMPREVIVAS: Extraordinary Women in the History of El Salvador. She is a three-time recipient of the National Poetry Prize in El Salvador, and her books have been published in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Though she currently lives in Mexico, she continues to work as an academic, artist, and activist in El Salvador. Her residency is made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

ko ko thett’s heart language is Burmese, but he often dunks himself in the discomfort of English. He has published and edited twelve poetry collections and translations in both Burmese and English, and taken part in a number of literary festivals, from Sharjah to Shanghai. His poems are widely published and translated. His translation work has been recognized with an English PEN Translates Award. ko ko thett’s most recent poetry collections include The Burden of Being Burmese and Bamboophobia, which has been shortlisted for the Walcott Prize. He lives between Iowa City, US, and Norwich, UK.