Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents January Reading Series

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce the guests for the January installment of our virtual reading series. This event will take place on January 26, 2021 from 7-8PM, on Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner who cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. Rasha’s writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Shade Journal, Mizna, Room, |tap| magazine, Beltway Poetry, and Lambda Literary. Their work is anthologized in Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (forthcoming), Unfettered Hexes, Halal if You Hear Me, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. A fiber artist, poet, and speculative fiction writer and editor, Rasha is a member of Justice for Muslims Collective, the Radius of Arab American Writers, and Alternate ROOTS. Their new chapbook is who is owed springtime. For more info on their most recent collection, visit: https://www.neonhemlock.com/books/who-is-owed-springtime-by-rasha-abdulhadi

Ugochukwu Damian Okpara is a Nigerian writer and poet and the author of the poetry chapbook, I Know the Origin of My Tremor (Sundress Publications, 2021). He is an alumnus of the SprinNG Fellowship and Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop taught by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. His works appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, African Writer Magazine, The Masters Review, 14 poems, Ruminate, The Penn Review, 20.35 Africa, and elsewhere. For more info on his most recent collection, visit: http://www.sundresspublications.com/e-chaps/tremor/

Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award, and Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award. Her third story collection, They Kept Running, is winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and is forthcoming in April 2022. Her work is included in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, The Best Small Fictions 2021, and in the forthcoming Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. For more info on her most recent collection, visit: https://www.stillhousepress.org/shapeshifting