An Evening with Rania Mamoun

Join us for a reading with Rania Mamoun a Sudanese journalist, activist, and City of Asylum writer-in-residence featuring her new collection of poetry, Something Evergreen Called Life. 

After years of writing and organizing against the regime of Omar al-Bashir, Rania Mamoun was finally forced to leave her country with her young daughters, taking refuge in Pittsburgh in the early throes of the pandemic. Confined to her new home, Rania embarked on a daily practice of writing, out of which emerged these poems of loss, despair, and hope. This work tells a story of grief and fear, both of feeling these intense emotions and of moving through them. It is a story of reaching for the warmth of light and the life that grows within it. Something Evergreen Called Life offers readers night piercing songs of exile and intimacy, brought into English by Yasmine Seale through lyrical and crystalline translation. 

Rania Mamoun is a writer and Sudanese resistance committee activist. A 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction Nadwa participant, Rania has published two novels in Arabic, Flash Akhdar (Green Flash) and Ibn-al-Shams (Son of the Sun). She is the author of the short story collection 13 Sharen Min Isharaq al Shams (Thirteen Months of Sunrise), which was translated to English by Elisabeth Jaquette and shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her writing has appeared in English translation in Mizna, for which she received a Pushcart Prize nomination, Shenandoah Literary Journal, Banipal Magazine, Words Without Borders, and The Fourth River. In 2020, Rania completed her first poetry manuscript in Arabic and since then has published articles, poems, and short stories in Medameek, Al Baeed Magazine, Kikah Magazine, Al Araby UK, and Al Democrati, a Sudanese newspaper.

The City of Asylum Exiled Writer and Artist Residency Program is a long-term residency for literary writers and other artists who are in exile from their home countries and under threat of persecution because of their work. The goal of this sanctuary program is to enable each writer- and artist-in-residence to continue to create while transitioning to a stable, independent life in exile.