Rasa Festival Literary Event and Concluding Reception
Celebrate the conclusion of the Rasa Festival 2017 with Akshara!
Poetry and Nonfiction Reading and Book Signing by Authors of Indian Origin Zilka Joseph, Saleem Peeradina and Shri Thanedar, address by Mayor of Ann Arbor, Christopher Taylor, and Piano recital by Veena Kulkarni and Tagore Song by Paramita Ray.
Program
– Welcome by Sreyashi Dey
– Remarks by Mayor of Ann Arbor, Christopher Taylor
– Piano recital by Veena Kulkarni and Tagore Song by Paramita Ray
– Poetry reading by Zilka Joseph
– Poetry reading by Saleem Peeradina
– Reading by Shri Thanedar
– Q&A
– Book signing: Literati Bookstore will be selling books at the venue
– Reception
Local poet Zilka Joseph, poet/nonfiction writer Saleem Peeradina and author Shri Thanedar will read their work and discuss the border crossings between poetry and nonfiction, and how that captures the experience of immigration and shifting self-understandings of Indo-Americans.
Featured poets/writers:
Zilka Joseph was nominated twice for a Pushcart, and was awarded a Zell Fellowship and the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship from the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared or will be appearing in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Mantis, Review Americana, Gastronomica. and in anthologies such as Cheers To Muses: Works by Asian American Women. Lands I Live In and What Dread, her chapbooks, were nominated for a PEN America award and a Pushcart respectively. Her new book Sharp Blue Search of Flame was published by Wayne State University Press and was a finalist for the Foreword Indie Book Awards. She teaches creative writing workshops, and is an independent editor and manuscript coach.
Saleem Peeradina
Saleem Peeradina
Saleem Peeradina, born 1944, is the author of First Offence (Newground, 1980), Group Portrait (OUP, 1992), Meditations on Desire (Ridgeway Press, 2003), Slow Dance (Ridgeway Press, 2010), Final Cut (Valley Press, 2016), and Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems (Copper Coin, 2017). He edited Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Macmillan, 1972), one of the earliest and most widely used texts in courses on South Asian literature. The Ocean in My Yard, a prose memoir of growing up in Bombay, was published by Penguin Books, in 2005. Meditations on Desire was published in Arabic translation by Kalima Publishers in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
His poetry is represented in most major anthologies of Indian, South Asian, and Asian American writing including The Oxford India Anthology of Poetry (1994), Living in America: Fiction and Poetry by South Asian-American Writers (1995), Contours of the Heart (1996), Uncommon Wealth (1997), Vespers: Contemporary American Poems of Religion and Spirituality (2003), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry (2008), and 60 Indian Poets, Penguin Books (2008).
Peeradina has given readings all over the world. In 2003, he served as writer-in-residence at American College, Madurai, India, and at Lenoir-Rhyne College, NC. In 2009-10, he was writer-in-residence at The Chelsea Public Library, MI.
Peeradina is Professor Emeritus at Siena Heights University, Adrian, Michigan.
Dr. Shri Thanedar
Dr. Shri Thanedar grew up in Belgaum, India, and in 1977 did his Master’s in chemistry at the University of Bombay He came to the United States in 1979 to obtain his Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry from the University of Akron(1982). He then worked as a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 1982 to 1984.
Shri is an award-winning entrepreneur creating hundreds of jobs and a best-selling author. He chronicled his rags to riches immigrant story in a 2005 book which became, and remains, a popular business autobiography in the Marathi language. The English version of that book, “The Blue Suitcase: Tragedy and Triumph in an Immigrant’s Life”, was published in 2008 as a limited-release edition, and was well-liked by its readers.
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