MC
Elena Basile writes, researches, and teaches in Tkaronto, Treaty 13. Born and raised in Italy to an English mother and an Italian father, Elena has spent most of her life writing about the entangled layers of language, culture and place that make belonging possible, collaborating with artists and writers along the way, and presently learning to decolonize her own approach. She is the poetry and translation editor forrumi roaming and an organizer of the Queer Feminist Translation, Affect, and Decoloniality Symposium.
JOINING ONLINE
Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, PhD (Duke University) was born in Havana in 1958. He is the Co-Director of Howard University Gallery of Art, and the author of Aestesis Decolonial Transmoderna Latinx_MX (2019). He exhibited at Haceres Decoloniales, Galeria ASAB, Bogota; and BE.BOP 2013, Berlin; and received grants from Critical Minded, FONCA, and Lyn Blumenthal Video Foundation.
Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, an art and publishing experience with a focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
Hajar Hussaini is a poet from Kabul, Afghanistan. She authored Disbound: Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2022) and translated Death and His Brother: A Novel by Khosraw Mani, translated from Persian (Syracuse University Press, 2025). Her translation of Maral Tahei’s poetry collection won the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Poetry and will be published by Deep Vellum in 2026. She is the visiting assistant professor of English at Skidmore College.
IN THE ROOM:
Soheila Javaheri is an Iranian born, multi award-winning filmmaker, visual poet, and writer. Soheila often merges forms and captures moments and atmosphere with a lightness and perspective that has an ineffable quality.
Savannah Nguyen is a writer and poet, based in Birmingham, UK. She has previously been published in The Visual Verse, Spare Parts Lit, Halu Halo Journal, The Dried Review, and Roi Fainéant Press. Sav is the one-woman team behind RECESSES ‘zine a permanent work in progress and home to Art that’s been forgotten, rejected, neglected, and the experimental.
Brwn Girl in the Ring™ is a storyteller, facilitator and historian through poetry, fiction writing and theatre. She explores themes of anti-colonial healing, spirituality, sensuality, nature, love & mysticism. Influenced by her experience as a British Malawian Indian Muslim woman, her vision is to create work that centres and speaks to Brown, Black, Muslim and ethnically diverse women, femmes, non-binary people and beyond. A spirit-tugging creative healer – poetry articulates when her lips don’t know where to start.
Queer Mehndi Nights provides an essential space for people to connect to their culture in a queer affirming environment. For many, it’s a chance to reclaim a part of our culture and exist as our whole selves fully and unapologetically. It’s a night that feels like chosen family, where the henna flows, the conversations run deep, and everyone is welcomed along for the night. The space is ran and held by artist Natasha Taheem.
VIDEOS FROM THE BOOK
broken hands and feet | nika khanjani, 2022
Nika Khanjani is an Isfahan-born, Houston-raised, NYC-skooled filmmaker, writer and somatic-based trauma healer residing as a guest on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kéha Nation, known as Tiohtià:ke or Montreal. She is the librettist for the opera Vanishing Point, adapted as her most recent film.
between shadow and light (excerpt) | charles c. smith with meryem alaoui, directed by gita hashemi, 2024
charles c. smith has written and edited sixteen books. He studied poetry with William Packard at New York University, edited three collections of poetry and his poetry has appeared in Poetry Canada Review, the Quille and Quire, Descant, Dandelion, Fiddlehead and others. His recent books include: travelogue of the bereaved (2014), whispers (2014) destination out (2018) and searching for eastman (2021).
Founder of Jasad Dance Projects, Meryem Alaoui is a dancer-choreographer from Morocco, living in Toronto. Her work is often an invitation towards a softer and sensorial experience of dance. Through her work at Jasad, she aims to increase the visibility of North African/Arab/Middle Eastern contemporary dance artists in Canada and internationally. Jasad.Ca
oneness of being (1 & 4): dawn of existence & open fields | gita hashemi, 2022
Iranian-born Gita Hashemi is an artist, curator and writer; a refugee, a displanted settler who works from T’karonto, the “Dish With One Spoon Territory,” the homelands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat nations, most recently the territory of the Mississaugas of Credit. She lives near Wonscotonach (burning bright point, aka Don) River. Her home in Shiraz was near Khoshk (dry) River. She was on the editorial committee of Canada’s first arts and politics publication Fuse Magazine, and taught new media, visual arts, and cultural studies at York University for many years. She has created and curated many generative and multi-platform projects.