Translating Imagery: A Craft Talk with Ladan Osman
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Poetry at Bennington—Fall 2021
OPEN TO PUBLIC I How do we create impressions in poetry? What are our tools? An introductory conversation on beautifully executed visual worlds in poems. Besides image systems, we’ll discuss other elements of revelation and mystery: storytelling, sonic elements, transitions, and metaphor development.
Ladan Osman is the Somali-born author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House, 2019), a hybrid work of poetry, photography, and experimental text; and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (U of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Her writing has been translated into over ten languages and has been honored with a Whiting Writers Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Lannan Foundation fellowship.
Her work in documentary film includes the shorts Sam Underground and Sun of the Soil, included in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Her directorial debut, The Ascendants, a docuseries about four young Black women musicians from Chicago, is streaming on TOPIC. Osman lives in Brooklyn.