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Zell Visiting Writers Series craft lectures are free and open to the public, and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in the Robert Hayden Conference Room-- Angell Hall #3222). Seats are offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot. Please contact asbates@umich.edu with any questions or accommodation needs.

Fady Joudah's craft lecture will explore the themes of recurrence and rumination. No poetry holds without a private lexicon. Not necessarily over the course of a poem or several but over a collection or several. A private lexicon take son different forms, syntactical, vernacular, and sometimes repetition of certain states of being and actual excerpts from one’s work that recur in search of the perfect or complete expression the poet can’t attain but can’t stop trying to attain.

A poet and a practicing physician of internal medicine, Fady Joudah, a Palestinian American, born in Texas, grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia before returning to the US to pursue a medical career. He is also a translator from the Arabic of several volumes of poetry. Learn more about Fady at: https://milkweed.org/author/fady-joudah

Fady Joudah's most recent book of poetry, Tethered to Stars, inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.”

Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.


For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email asbates@umich.edu-- we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services at in-person events are available upon request; please email asbates@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event, whenever possible, to allow time to arrange services.

U-M employees with a U-M parking permit may use the Church Street Parking Structure (525 Church St., Ann Arbor) or the Thompson Parking Structure (500 Thompson St., Ann Arbor). There is limited metered street parking on State Street and South University Avenue. The Forest Avenue Public Parking Structure (650 South Forest Ave., Ann Arbor) is five blocks away, and the parking rate is $1.20 per hour. All of these options include parking spots for individuals with disabilities.