New Writing Series: Eleni Sikelianos Kazim Ali

About

About New Writing Series

UC San Diego’s New Writing Series invites local, national, and international authors to read and perform throughout the academic year. Welcoming a wide range of authors and genres, including playwrights, poets, translators, essayists, critics, fiction writers, and performance artists, the New Writing Series celebrates both emerging and established award-winning writers. Readers also include Department of Literature faculty and graduate students in the MFA Program in Writing. The readings are followed by in-depth question and answer periods that center on craft and artistic practice.

The New Writing Series is co-sponsored by the Department of Literature and the UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

Recordings of New Writing Series readings, as well as its predecessor, the New Poetry Series, which dates back to 1972, are part of the Archive for New Poetry in UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

This New Writing Series event features readings from Eleni Sikelianos and Kazim Ali.

Born into a family of bohemians, poets, tree workers, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and “master of mixing genres” (according to TimeOut). Kirkus has called her most recent book, Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026; the third book in her trilogy of ancestral encounters) “a moving family memoir and a triumph of cultural archaeology.” Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Her tenth book of poetry, Your Kingdom came out in 2023. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she has in turn translated works by Jacques Roubaud, Sabine Macher, and, most recently, Mohamed Leftah. She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Goleta, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. More info at: (link below) Insta: @elenisikelianos

Kazim Ali is the author of over twenty books in multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, memoir, and literary studies. His research and teaching interests include Creative Writing and Literary Arts, Indigenous Studies, Global Anglophone Literature, Palestine and Palestinian Diaspora Studies, as well as Translation and Translation Studies. His book Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water won the Banff Mountain Environmental Book Award in 2021. From 2021-2024, he served as Chair of the Literature Department. He is the founder of the small press Nightboat Books.