BOOK RELEASE! Said Shaiye for ARE YOU BORG NOW? in conversation with Douglas Kearney
Monday, June 30, 2025, 7:00 p.m.
East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106
Join us at the East Side Freedom Library for a book release reading and conversation with noted author Said Shaiye and award-winning poet Douglas Kearney.
Are You Borg Now? by Said Shaiye (NOEMI Press) is an Afrofuturist memoir returns in a second edition with a new introduction by Douglas Kearney. Said Shaiye’s cross-genre work blends nonfiction and poetry in an experimental interview the author conducts with his younger self, rejecting the conventions of memoir and what
is expected of who writes them, specifically when that writer is an immigrant. Are You Borg Now? ciphers with trauma through a poetics of refusal via hard and beautiful language. Finding vigor in Islam and mirrors in Star Trek: Voyager, Shaiye shifts achingly between memory and improvisation.
Said Shaiye is an Autistic + ADHD Somali Writer, Photographer & Filmmaker. He was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow & won a Minnesota State Arts Grant to lead a BIPOC Neurodivergent Writing Workshop. He was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize by Indiana Review for his essay “Sneak a Uzi on the Island in my Army Jacket lining.” His first edition of Are You Borg Now?, was a 2022 Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir.
He has published poetry & prose in Indiana Review, Texas Review, Obsidian, Brittle Paper, Pithead Chapel, 580 Split, and elsewhere.
He is a writing professor in Minneapolis.
“Why should one write? This is the question that pervades Said Shaiye’s experimental approach to memoir in Are You Borg Now? This book offers many different kinds of answers to such a question, answers that involve facing the effects of trauma and violence with courage, honesty, and a willingness to risk vulnerability. One reason to write is to call forth a voice in solidarity with others who suffer. Shaiye is a writer who transforms the pain of alienation into beautifully lyric writing and from that writing springs a profound faith that one is never really alone.” -Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye
Douglas Kearney has published nine books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner and a National Book Award, Pen America, and Kingsley Tufts Award finalist. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow.
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE FOR THE CAUSE OF SOLIDARITY
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