Chin Music poetry December 9 at 7 pm.

Please join us for a very special Chin Music benefit reading for the Pirogue Collective featuring three fine poets: Breyten Breytenbach, David Hinton, and Emna Zghal. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller. Special thanks to Archipelago Books.

Pirogue Collective is a not-for-profit organization supporting artists living and working in Africa through the Imagine Africa publications and the Taalifkat Tudunya Writing Workshops, hosted by the Gorée Institute in Gorée, Senegal.

Sierra Celebration will be $1 off, with half the sales of that beer going toward the cost for one African artist to attend the Taalifkat Tudunya Workshop in January 2011. Donations encouraged.

FEATURED POETS

Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, painter, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and activist. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to Paris in the late '60s and became deeply involved in teh anti-Apartheid movement. Breytenbach's works include All One Horse, Mouroir, Notes from the Middle World, A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Dog Heart, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, Lady One, and Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish. His many honors include the Alan Paton Award, the Hertzog Prize, the Max Jacob Prize, and the Mahmoud Darwish Award. Breytenbach is the Executive Director of the Gorée Institute in Senegal.

David Hinton's many translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poems that convey the actual texture and density of the originals. He edited and translated Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology and translated The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan. He is also the first translator in over a century to translate the four seminal masterworks of Chinese philosophy: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, Mencius. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and both of the major awards given for poetry translation in the United States: the Landon Translation Award, from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Award. He is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in New York City. He lives in Vermont.

Emna Zghal is a Tunisian-born U.S. based visual artist. Besides her work in painting and printmaking, Zghal works with text using poetry and prose in various languages. Her paintings and artist's books are represented in public collections like the New York Public Library, Yale University, and The Museum for African Art in New York. Zghal has received fellowships and done projects with the Women's Studio Workshop, the Newark Art Museum, the MacDowell Colony, the Weir Farm Trust, and the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. In 2008 she was awarded a Creative Capital grant for a public art project, Dark Turquoise, in collaboration with Michael Rakowitz.