An Evening of Lyrical Testimony with Ladan OsmanSomali-born poet and essayist Ladan Osman is the author of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, and the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the box-set Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her next collection Exiles of Eden, a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text, is forthcoming with Coffee House Press in 2019.
"What is it like to be so free?To drift in water in a country you callYour own. Unprepared because you can laughInto an official’s face." – from "Boat Journey"
Osman is concerned with the question of testimony. Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Her writing is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She examines existence in roles where imagination around female ability is limited, in the many spaces where women are so often denied automatic credibility and their logic is assumed fallible. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Rumpus, among others. Osman’s writing has been translated into over 10 languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn. Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies Research Group, with co-sponsorship by American Studies, Creative Writing, Department of English, Society for the Humanities & Helena Maria Viramontes