Join us in the Reading Room of Hammes Bookstore for a special conversation between award-winning author Sofia Samatar and poet, critic, and translator Johannes Göransson. Books will be available to purchase from Hammes Bookstore after the event.
When: Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Time: Pre-Event Reception 1:30 p.m. | Event 2:00 p.m.
Where: Hammes Bookstore Reading Room (2nd Floor)
Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque. Her works include the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria and Monster Portraits, an exploration of monsters in collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Obsidian, The White Review, North American Review, The Paris Review Daily, The New Inquiry, Research in African Literatures, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied modern Arabic literature and wrote a dissertation on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. Samatar’s collaborative study of literature with Kate Zambreno, Tone, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2023. Her science fiction novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, a story of universities, carceral systems, and breath, is forthcoming from Tor.com in 2024. Sofia Samatar lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University, where she is Roop Distinguished Professor of English.
Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry and criticism, most recently Summer (2022), and is the translator of several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Helena Boberg and Kim Yideum. His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and broad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). His is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and, together with Joyelle McSweeney, edits Action Books.