Poetry Reading: Rooja Mohassessy

Join us for a multi-media event featuring Macdowell fellows Jaime Lowe and Rooja Mohassessy in celebration of Rooja’s award-winning debut verse memoir When Your Sky Runs Into Mine. Ellen Bass says about the collection, "When Your Sky Runs Into Mine is a stunning debut collection. Set against childhood in the post-revolutionary Iran of the 1980s and coming of age as an American immigrant, the poems are an intricate ekphrastic dance where the poet embodies the roles of women, and decides, “It’s time to come to terms / with the dark” ––the dark of the chador, the dark of the hijab, of blackouts during bombing, of immigrant guilt for family left behind. This collection is also about personal revolution, the turning toward art in times of suffering, the claiming of a rich cultural heritage.” The poems are in conversation with the art and legacy of Bahman Mohassess (1931-2010), the prominent Iranian painter and sculptor often referred to as the Persian Picasso.

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Jaime Lowe is a contributor to the New York Times magazine and other national and international publications. She's the author of Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires, Mental: Lithium, Love and Losing My Mind and Digging for Dirt: the Life and Death of ODB.