In partnership with the Center for the Art of Translation/Two Lines Press, the Mill Valley Library is thrilled to present Hair on Fire: an evening of Afghan Women poets.

In Hair on Fire, five female Afghan poets wield language to combat the loneliness, absurdity, and claustrophobia of life in a war-torn country and its diaspora. There are long hypnotic beards tangled with mass extinctions; hateful men burning grapevines; black blindfolds; jinn in chadors; and condoms advertised every eight minutes on TV. Interspersing these are tender moments: one poet describes brushing her daughter’s hair, while another imagines a tree growing at the center of a room, undisturbed by the bombs outside. In the wake of the Taliban’s escalating war on Afghan women’s rights, Hair on Fire is a blazing tribute to a group of exceptional poetesses and a reminder of what we lose when voices are silenced.

Diana Arterian, Samantha Cosentino, Armen Davoudian, Sabrina Nouri, and Fatemeh Shams read from their translations of poetry by Nadia Anjuman, Mahbouba Ibrahimi, Mariam Meetra, and Karima Shabrang.

Diana Arterian holds a PhD in literature & creative writing from the University of Southern California and is the author of the poetry collections Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press) and Playing Monster :: Seiche, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. A poetry editor at Noemi Press, she writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at LitHub and lives in Los Angeles.

Born in Argentina and raised bilingually in California, Samantha Cosentino explores the interior and exterior landscapes of migration, home, and identity in her creative work. Cosentino holds an MFA in creative writing and has taught in colleges, universities, and schools in the US and abroad. She has published poetry and translation in Asymptote, New American Writing, and elsewhere. Cosentino lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she writes, translates, and works in education.

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, 2024), longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle 132Award in Poetry, and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024).

Sabrina Nouri grew up in Kabul and Paris. She holds an MA in language arts and a BA in Iranian studies from the Sorbonne University. Nouri has introduced several new Afghan authors and translated their novels into French. She has been awarded the Amédée-Pichot Prize and the Inalco Prize. Her translation La Frontière des Oubliés became the first work by an Iranian-Afghan author to be published by Gallimard. She currently lives in San Francisco.

Fatemeh Shams is the author of When They Broke Down the Door (Mage Publishers, 2016), translated by Dick Davis, and Hopscotch (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), translated by Armen Davoudian. She teaches Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania.