EventsCommon Ground

Publishing-in-Transit: Tamaas

Featuring Sarah Riggs, Safaa Fathy, Alisha Mascarenhas, and Cole Swensen

Thursday, November 11, 2021 12 p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Sarah Riggs, Safaa Fathy, and Alisha Mascarenhas of inter-cultural organization Tamaas join writer and critic Cole Swensen for a conversation on literary publishing. We open and conclude with readings from guests.

In this Talk

Publishing-in-Transit is a monthly series celebrating contemporary literary editors, all of the often-unrecognized work that they do, and the community-based and conversational nature of contemporary innovative literary publishing.

View our past episodes:

New York Review Books →

Tender Buttons Press →

New Directions →

Ugly Duckling Presse →

Cave Canem →

Sarah Riggs

Writer and artist Sarah Riggs is the author most recently of The Nerve Epistle, a book of letter poems newly out with Roof Books this November 2021. Her translation from the French of Etel Adnan’s TIME with Nightboat won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. Riggs is also the producer of Outrider, a forthcoming film on and with the poet and performer Anne Waldman, working together with the director and cinematographer, Alystyre Julian. Riggs is a podcaster of Invitation to the Species with Tamaas, and has a daily artistic practice of working with ink and acrylic. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Omar Berrada, and their two daughters.

https://sarahriggs.org/

Safaa Fathy

Poet, filmmaker, and essayist Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt and obtained her PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1993. She has been Director of Programme at the International College of Philosophy (2010–2016). She wrote Ordalie and Terreur with an introduction by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed Tourner les mots. Her most recent poetry books are Revolution goes through walls (SplitLevel ed.) and A name to the sea (Dar Al Nahda). Her last play is Aquarius, in Sillas en la frontera. Her last films are Mohammad saved from the waters, Derrida’s elsewhere, and Nom à la mer. Her most recent essays are "Au nom de la Mural" (Europe N. 1053-1053) and "De mur en mur" (rue Descartes N.92).

http://safaafathy.org/en/

Alisha Mascarenhas

Poet, teacher, and literary translator Alisha Mascarenhas is most recently the author of Contagion Fields, published with the Belladonna* 2021 chaplet series. Alisha is co-editor of READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Cole Swensen

Photo by Anthony Hayward

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨