Poetry Reading with Zafer Şenocak, 2024 Max Kade Writer-in-Residence and Dunya Mikhail

Zafer Şenocak and Dunya Mikhail will present a multilingual Poetry Reading from their books, First Light, Zafer Şenocak (Zephyr Press, 2024) and
Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail (New Directions, 2024).

Zafer Şenocak is a prolific Turkish-German poet, novelist, essayist and public intellectual, who has published more than 30 books over the past 40 years. Born in Turkey, Şenocak moved to Germany as a child, and has lived in Berlin as a freelance writer since 1989. He has written widely on issues of diversity in Germany, migration and exile, the Turkish diaspora, and the small distances and great fears of a globalizing Europe. Historical questions of mixed and broken identities are key to his novels, which utilize nonlinear modes of storytelling to emphasize the fragmented nature of memory. His writing includes poetry and novels in both German and Turkish, and he is a frequent contributor to nationwide German newspapers, like Tageszeitung, Tagesspiegel and Die Welt. Şenocak’s work has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Czech.

Şenocak has been a writer in residence at UC Berkeley, M.I.T., Oberlin College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Arizona. He is currently in residence at the University of Michigan during the Fall 2024 term. A volume of his German-language poems appeared in English translation as Door Languages in 2008 (trans. Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright, Zephyr Press). And his essay collection "Atlas of a Tropical Germany" was edited and translated by Prof. Leslie A. Adelson in 2000 (Nebraska Press). Most recently, his Turkish-language poetry has been translated into English by UM Professor Kristin Dickinson, which appeared in a bilingual edition with Zephyr Press in 2024 under the title First Light.

Dunya Mikhail is an award-winning Iraqi American novelist and poet. Born in Baghdad, she earned a BA at the University of Baghdad and worked as a translator and journalist for the Baghdad Observer before being placed on Saddam Hussein’s enemies list. Mikhail immigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and earned an MA at Wayne State University. She currently teaches Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan. With irony and subversive simplicity, Mikhail’s writing addresses themes of war, exile, and loss, using forms such as reportage, fable, and lyric. Her most recent collection of poems, Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, transforms the world’s first symbols—Sumerian glyphs that were carved into clay tablets—into the matter of our everyday contemporary life.