Faculty Reading with Mariam Rahmani & Michael Dumanis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Join us for a reading to welcome Mariam Rahmani to the Literature faculty and to celebrate Michael Dumanis’ new poetry collection, Creature, from Four Way Books.

Mariam Rahmani

Mariam Rahmani's fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, BOMB Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and exhibition catalogs; and her translation in n+1, Columbia Journal, and the collected volume, After Cinema: Fictions From A Collective Memory (Archive Book, 2019). Her first book-length translation of the 2008 Iranian cult hit, In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali was on The New Yorker’s "Best Books of 2022" list, and otherwise well-reviewed in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. Rahmani holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Among her honors and awards are the 2021 Henfield Prize, the Columbia MFA’s highest honor in fiction, a 2018 PEN/Heim translation grant, and a U.S. Fulbright fellowship. She previously taught at UCLA as a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature.

Michael Dumanis

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collections Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He is also coeditor (with poet Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006) and (with poet Kevin Prufer) of Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Believer, Colorado Review, The Common, Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and Poetry; in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Project and on the Poetry Society of America website. His writing has been recognized with residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy; a grant from the Ohio Arts Council; a 2012 Community Partnership for Arts and Culture Creative Workforce Fellowship; and the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award. He holds a BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. In addition to being a member of the Literature faculty, he serves as Director of Poetry at Bennington and Editor of Bennington Review.