RHINO READS Poetry Reading
in conjunction with The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar
Filter Photo is pleased to present a poetry reading in conjunction with our current exhibition, The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar. RHINO READS Poets Beth McDermott, Dipika Mukherjee, and Sarah Carson will respond to the photographs in the exhibition. Join us to immerse yourself in words and images.
The Moon Belongs to Everyone speaks to the experience of immigration and diaspora, to the physical and emotional implications of reimagining home, belonging, and community while mourning what is lost in that process. A first-generation Iranian-American, Mehrfar grew up on Long Island, navigating the challenges of reconciling two distinct cultures. Shortly after her thirtieth birthday, she emigrated to Australia, a relocation that left her feeling out of place. She assumed her return to New York a decade later would be a homecoming; instead, she felt
estranged, time away rendering the landscape unfamiliar. Though Mehrfar’s personal experience informs her approach, the work adopts a universal perspective rooted in the evocative rather than the specific.
Beth McDermott is the author of Figure 1 (Pine Row Press) and a chapbook titled How to Leave a Farmhouse (Porkbelly Press). Her poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Memorious. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.
Dipika Mukherjee’s newest poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022. She is also the author of the chapbook The Palimpsest of Exile (2009), and The Third Glass of Wine (2015). Her poetry appears in publications around the world, including RHINO, PostColonial Text, World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review and Chicago Quarterly Review and she won the Liakoura Prize for Poetry in 2016. She is the recipient of a 2022 Esteemed Artist Award (DCASE) from the City of Chicago and she teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School at University of Chicago.
Born and raised in Michigan, Sarah Carson grew up in Chicago while writing poems, essays, and stories that have appeared in the Colorado Review, Diagram, Brevity, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Illinois Arts Council, Tin House, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and Copper Nickel, her most recent collection of poetry is How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editors' Prize from Persea Books.
Date: February 24th, 2023
Time: 6:00 – 8 PM CT
Cost: FREE
Location: Filter Space | 1821 W Hubbard St, Suite 207
