Join Tarik Dobbs with special guests Julian Randall, I.S. Jones and Katana Smith, in celebration of his debut poetry collection Nazar Boy.

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.

Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.

Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.

Get Nazar Boy from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2217-nazar-boy

***This in person event will be live-streamed through Haymarket Books. Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. 

We ask that all in-person attendees wear masks in the event space during the program for the health and well-being of the speaker and other guests. We will have a reception afterwards with light refreshments and books available for purchase.***

Speakers: 

Tarik Dobbs (b.1997; Dearborn, MI) is a writer, an artist, and a Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Tarik’s poems appear in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as AGNI, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Tarik helps run poetry.onl, and served as a guest editor at Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America as well as Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Tarik received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, and is currently an M.F.A. fellow in art, theory, practice at Northwestern University.

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. His poetry and essays are published in the New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Atlantic, and Vibe. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Julian holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss. His first book, Refuse, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He was also a contributor to the #1 New York Times-bestseller Black Boy Joy. Julian has previously worked as a youth mentor, teaching writing workshops to children on house arrest. Pilar Ramirez and the Escape from Zafa is his debut children's novel. Follow him on Twitter!

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and essayist. She has received support in the form of fellowships, retreats, and residencies from Hedgebrook, Brooklyn Poets, Sewanee’s Writers Conference, Callaloo, Bread Loaf, and The Watering Hole. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. For the last three years, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) was selected by Newfound for their Emerging Poets Series. I.S. Jones is a 2023 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar. She is currently an instructor with Brooklyn Poets, a reader for Poetry Magazine, and is at work on her debut full-length collection of poems.

Katana Smith is a poet and writer from Aurora, Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, RHINO poetry, and elsewhere. She is a freelance writer and serves as Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University. Katana earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the Litowitz graduate program at Northwestern University. She is a McNair Scholar, and a graduate of the creative writing program at Knox College. She lives in Chicago.