Fady Joudah
Delcamp Visiting Writer
Presented in collaboration with the Delcamp Visiting Writer Series
Fady Joudah is the winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize and has published six collections of poems, including “The Earth in the Attic,” “Alight,” “Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance,” “Tethered to Stars” and “Textu,” a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cell phone character count. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Arab American Book Award. Along with writing poetry, Joudah volunteers for Doctors Without Borders and serves as an emergency room physician. He lives in Houston.
- Public talk and book signing – Tuesday, Oct. 29, 6 p.m., Carrick Theater
“Aesthetics of Return”
Readings
Alight by Publication Date: 2013The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Gl#65533;ck. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Textu by Publication Date: 2013Emerging in the era of tweets and text-messages comes a new poetic form: textu. The "u” in textu echoes the one in haiku, and also emphasizes the intimate you. A textu poem has a single rule: be exactly 160 characters long. As theme, form, and style are wide opened, a textu reveals new possibilities and poetry in unexpected ways.
Tethered to stars : poems by ISBN: 9781571317315Publication Date: 2021From Fady Joudah, an elegant collection of poems that shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and the horoscope
Footnotes in the order of disappearance : poems by ISBN: 9781571319784Publication Date: 2018An exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic. In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah has written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together the language of medicine with the language of desire in images at once visceral and vulnerable. A symptomatic moon. A peach, quartered like a heart, and a heart, quartered like a peach. 'I call the finding of certain things loss.' Joudah is a translator between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word body and the world body'and between languages, with a polyglot's hyperresonant sensibility. In 'Sagittal Views, ' the book's middle section, Joudah collaborates with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history. Together they mark the place the past occupies in the body, the cut that 'runs deeper than speech.' Generous in its scope, inventive in its movements and syntax, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance is a richly rewarding and indispensable collection.
Joudah, Fady, and David Baker. “A Conversation with Fady Joudah.” The Kenyon Review 31, no. 3 (2009): 69–83.
Joudah, Fady. “Sandra Bland, Texas.” The Kenyon Review 42, no. 5 (2020): 72–76.
Schatzman, Grant. “Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah.” World Literature Today 92, no. 3 (2018): 80–82.
Shenoda, Matthew. “[. . .]: Poems by Fady Joudah (Review).” World Literature Today 98, no. 4 (2024): 67.
Tuffaha, Lena Khalaf. “The Silence That Remains by Fady Joudah.” World Literature Today 92, no. 1 (2018): 84–86.