Bookends & Beginnings and the Guild Literary Complex present an afternoon of literary celebration—including a RHINO Poetry reading!
Visit RHINO at our Fountain Square LitFest booth and for this reading with five outstanding poets. 🦏
Featured Readers
🦏 Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest, now living in New York. They were named the 2022 George B. Hill Poetry Prize Winner and the Lyman S.V. Judson Awardee in the Creative Arts. Her poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Poetry Northwest, and LAKEER Mag, and have been featured in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Foglifter, Adroit, The Offing, BAHR Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, RHINO, and others. She studied Creative Writing and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
🦏 Nile Lansana is an interdisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago. An acclaimed writer, poet, performer, and filmmaker, his work is centered around revealing radical truths and amplifying marginalized voices and narratives through a lens of Black imagination and visionary intention. He is a nominee for the inaugural Chicago Poet Laureate position. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in Journalism and English-Creative Writing. He is a nominee for the inaugural Chicago Poet Laureate. He won the 2021 Ronald Wallace Poetry Thesis Prize and 2020 George B Hill Poetry Prize. His work is published in American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, & elsewhere. He holds fellowships from the Rebuild Foundation and Obsidian Foundation. He is a proud uncle and the oldest of four Black boys.
🦏 Timothy David Rey is a playwright, poet, and performer. His poetic play. .ZIP! was a 2023 semifinalist for the Eugene O Neill National Playwrights Conference. His poetry and creative writing have been exhibited at the Poetry Foundation, Steppenwolf Theater Lookout Series, Obsidian: The Literature of the African Diaspora, RHINO Poetry (forthcoming), and Black Horse Review. He is a Newcity magazine's 2025 Lit 50 (People who really 'book' in Chicago.)
🦏 Maja and Steven Teref’s translations include Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award, and Novica Tadić’s Assembly. Their translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. The Terefs’ latest book is Milena Marković’s sympathy for the salami, a translated collection of her shorter poems, which features two excerpts from Children. Steven is a co-editor with Aleksandar Bošković of Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology. He is the editor for Academic Studies Press’ Companions to Slavic Literature series. Maja teaches at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she is also the faculty advisor for the student-run literary translation journal Ouroboros Review. The Terefs are members of the Third Coast Translators Collective.
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