Manav Sachdeva Poetry Reading

Urdu Poetry website (mrurdupoetry.com). Manav Sachdeva Maasoom Shah was the New York City Luce Foundation and the United Nations Poet Laureate for 2015. His first book, The Sufi’s Garland, was published by Roman Books Kolkata in 2011.

His second book, Siyaah Shaam Ka Ikhtetaam (The End of a Very Dark Evening), is expected to go to press this year (2020). He studied Poetry and Policy Studies for his Master’s at Columbia University, and at Harvard University Olympia Program in Comparative Literature, Society, and Culture through a full Kokallis Foundation Scholarship. Manav Sachdeva Maasoom Shah grew up in Ludhiana, Punjab, India till fifteen, went to high school and undergraduate in California, dropped out of a seven-year UCR-UCLA Biomed program for the love of poetry writing and social reform as a shock decision for a scion of doctors, pursued love of literature and languages through an arduous journey at various universities and through various loans and scholarships (Ann Arbor—University of Michigan) and Harvard and Columbia.

Sonja Horgen ‘s path began with a magazine in Egypt and led, by way of USAID projects, to Afghanistan, where she lived for four and a half years across a decade. She wrote about development, then managed it village by village. After law school she went back, this time as an attorney, to a country she had already learned to see from several angles.

She is eager to talk about how writers hold on to places that outsiders so often flatten. About Sufi’s Garland Published in connection with the 150th birth-anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel Laureate, THE SUFI’S GARLAND is a collection of poems on love, religion and humanity. The stony hills of Afghanistan, the land of the Taliban terror, forms the backdrop and one has to listen to the Sufi’s muse to believe that this howling dry wind can also tune a music so soulful!

It is a reader’s sojourn in a caravan to unfold the mysteries of life in an attempt to explore ‘a sufibhakt’s fonts in mass rapture with Bhagwan’s theatre’. As a tribute to Emily Dickinson, Antonio Porchia and Rabindranath Tagore THE SUFI’S GARLAND is an utterly hypnotic read in its truest sense. If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org .

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