Amira Hanafi Poetry Reading
Tuesday, November 5th The City of Asylum Detroit hosted poet Amira Hanafi. Hanafi is an acclaimed poet based in Cairo, Egypt. She takes a unique approach to crafting her works, which often involves combining parts of other texts or quotations from others to create a piece. During the event, Hanafi shared poems from several different books of hers, including Minced English and A Dictionary of the Revolution. However, Hanafi says she considers these works to be texts more than poems. In Minced English Hanafi used definitions of words and parts of other texts using those words to create a message. 
The works in A Dictionary of the Revolution involved parts of conversations with others combined to form a poem or "text." Hanafi also shared a few poems. One was entitled "My Other Country," to create this poem she used Google search to see which results populated when typing in that phrase. She also crafted poems out of what she collected on the app What Would I Say. Each piece Hanafi shared was unique and thought-provoking. To learn more about Amira Hanafi and her projects, check out her website here.
This was the first event the new student org and its parent institution City of Asylum Detroit hosted, and it was a great success! It was an honor to host Hanafi at WSU and an excellent way to raise awareness about this astounding new student org.
By Nicole Saez