Performance: Roots and Resonance: Poetry Reading by Monica Mody and Sophia Naz
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 16/04/2024

A reading by two South Asian diasporic poets, Monica Mody and Sophia Naz, whose poetry takes on/seeks to retell the histories and memories of the sacred and the profane, the oral and the experimental, the liminal and the subliminal, India and Pakistan. The poets share commonalities across partitioned ancestral stories, and they persist through the ambiguities of singing the dead to life.

Monica Mody is a poet, scholar, educator and the author of Wild Fin (Weavers Press, 2024), Bright Parallel (Copper Coin, 2023) and Kala Pani (1913 Press, 2013). Her writing has won awards including the Sparks Prize (Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa) and the TOTO Award for Creative Writing.

Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, artist, editor, translator and author of Bark Archipelago (Weavers Press, San Francisco & Red River, India 2023), Open Zero (Yoda Press 2021), Shehnaz (Penguin Random House 2019), Pointillism (Copper Coin 2017), Date Palms (City Press 2017) and Peripheries (Cyberhex 2015). She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry.