Poetry at Literati: Tamar Boyadjian, Tarfia Faizullah, Airea D. Matthews

Literati is pleased to welcome Tamar Boyadjian, Tarfia Faizullah, & Airea D. Matthews to the store in celebration of National Poetry Month.

Tamar Boyadjian is the author of it is what it is and the vineyard of mirrors. Her poetic and academic work has been included in a number of literary journals and creative anthologies around the world including the United States, Turkey, Armenia, parts of Europe and the Middle East. Tamar teaches medieval literature (and the literature of other people and cultures) as well as creative writing at Michigan State University, and is involved with the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan.

Poet, editor, and educator Tarfia Faizullah was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, NY and raised in west Texas. She received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of Seam, which U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey calls “beautiful and necessary,” as well asRegister of Eliminated Villages (forthcoming from Graywolf in 2017).

Airea D. Matthews is a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and the executive editor of The Offing. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she earned her MFA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poet,The Missouri Review, The Baffler, Callaloo, Indiana Review, WSQ and elsewhere. Her performance work has been featured at the Cannes Lions Festival, PBS’ RoadTrip Nation and NPR. She lives in Detroit with her husband and their four children.