Internationally renowned poet, playwright and editor Nathalie Handal will give a reading at Ciné, 234 W. Hancock Ave., Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. The event is part of the 2014 Global Georgia Initiative, a program of UGA’s Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
Handal’s poetry collections include The Neverfield, The Lives of Rain and Love and Strange Horses, a gold medal winner for poetry in the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her latest collection, Poet in Andalucía, reverses the journey of Spanish writer Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York.
Handal is a French-American, born in Haiti, of a Palestinian family from Bethlehem.
She has lectured and taught around the world, including as Picador Guest Professor at Leipzig University, Germany, and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University and a member of the low-residency MFA faculty at Sierra Nevada College.
Alice Walker has praised Handal’s “poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve.”
Poet and editor Ed Ochester has said, “If there is such a thing as a Renaissance figure among younger poets writing in America, that person is Nathalie Handal.”
Her theatrical works include The Stonecutters, Hakawatiyeh and Men in Verse. She edited the anthology The Poetry of Arab Women and was a co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. Her works have been translated into more than 15 languages.
After her reading, Handal will take part in a discussion and audience question-and-answer session with Ed Pavlic, professor of English at UGA.