March 2027
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Monday, 3/29/2027
Tuesday, 3/30/2027
A Relation of a Third Kind: Poetic Orientations to the Body, Nation, and Becoming
Syd Zolf and Sanam Sheriff in conversation with Divya Victor
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program
Join Artist in Residence Syd Zolf (Neutrøis) and debut poet Sanam Sheriff (HUM) to celebrate the release of two books of poetry that theorize, actuate, and illuminate trans and immigrant life at a critical juncture of democracy in Canada, India, and the United States. We will meet in joyful query into kinship and creative practice and listen to exquisite passages from these new books. Syd’s latest book, the much-anticipated Neutrøis, and Sanam’s sparkling debut, HUM, chronicle and describe provocative transition events – undertaking gender transition, crossing national borders as immigrants, entering and exiting family systems, and undergoing grief and the loss of kin. Neutrøis takes up collagist, documentary strategies motivated by queer and trans feminisms of the margin while HUM vibrates with the influence of lush Urdu lyricism and South Asian maximalism. We will consider: How do we undertake an internal sense of self while navigating external borders? What do precarity and risk teach us? How do beauty and learning swell from the cut of grief? How is kinship shaped by travel and creative practice? Syd and Sanam will discuss how subjectivity transforms across a lifetime, becoming both sublime and fugitive in its physical forms, and imagine poetry as a living response to national and private histories of disciplinary and punitive constraints. This event will feature convivial engagement with the audience, performances from featured writers, and nourishing discussion. All are welcome; no specialized knowledge of poetry, literature, or theory is required; reception to follow.
Syd Zolf’s trans poetics enact life and art as constant, fugitive becoming without end — queerly interrogating history, ideology, and systems of power, their work pushes language to its limits and beyond, generating meaning that is forever in flux, never neutralized, always becoming possible. Zolf has published eight books, most recently Neutrøis (Coach House, 2027), No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke, 2021), and a selected poetry, Social Poesis (WLU, 2019). Honors Zolf has received include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, numerous major grants, and finalist for several prizes, including two Lambda Literary Awards. Zolf’s work has been widely published in journals and anthologies worldwide and has been translated into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Zolf’s art films have screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam and White Cube Bermondsey. Their literary papers are housed at York University Archives and Simon Fraser University. Zolf lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Penn.
Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, performer, and educator from Bangalore, India. Their debut poetry collection, HUM (University of Nebraska Press, 2026), won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry. Currently, Sanam teaches creative writing at Haverford College. Her work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Outlook India, and elsewhere. Sanam is a Kundiman Fellow, a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop scholar, and a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson fellowship. They hold an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and from 2022 to 2025, they served as an assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sanam lives in Philadelphia, where she curates The Poets' Studio at Twelve Gates Arts.
Divya Victor is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Curb, which won the PEN Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award for Kin, her forthcoming collection of essays from Graywolf. She is also the author of Kith, Natural Subjects, Things to Do with your Mouth, and other books. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program. She has been a citizen of India, Singapore, and the United States, and is at home in all these countries