Khaled Mattawa "Mare Nostrum: Lyric Documentation and the Migrant (Crisis/Flow)"
Channel: Mobility and Movement
Date: 2018-10-06

Mattawa presents “Mare Nostrum: Lyric Documentation and the Migrant (Crisis/Flow)” at the Faculty College on Mobility and Movement at the College of Wooster.

Khaled Mattawa, poet, translator, and Professor at the University of Michigan”. Mattawa has an undergraduate degree in political science and economics is from the University of Tennessee. His MA and MFA are from Indiana University, and his PhD from Duke University. He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2014, an Academy of American Poets award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2003 and 2011, and two Pushcart prizes. Influenced by Milan Kundera and Federico García Lorca, as well as the Arab poets whose work he translates, Mattawa’s poetry frequently explores the intersection of culture, narrative, and memory. In a 2007 Blackbird interview, addressing the connection between his emigration from Libya to the United States and his poetry, Mattawa observed: “I think memory was very important to my work as a structure, that the tone of remembrance, or the position of remembering, is very important, was a way of speaking when I was in between deciding to stay and not stay, and I had decided to stay.”