The Broad Stage at Home - Red Hen Press Poetry Hour - July 16

On Thursday July 16 at 6 pm PT, a program entitled Finding Truths and Creating Art in Exile features Award-winning playwrights Iranian-American Sholeh Wolpé and Iranian Nassim Soleimanpour. Soleimanpour's most recent play Nassim will be performed in The Broad Stage 2020/21 season in April 2021.

Guests playwright Nathalie Handal, poet Lory Bedikian Sholeh Wolpé and Nassim Soleimanpour will be moderated by actor/writer Sandra Tsing Loh.

This new series of episodes brings together performing artists and poets to explore social justice themes central to works featured in The Broad Stage's 2020/21 is online through December.

Readings and conversations on bridging the gap between perceptions and reality of cultural norms. The artists will explore the lives they live-and the lives that people in the West imagine for them.

Lory Bedikian's The Book of Lamenting won the 2010 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. Her poems have been published in the Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore and Heliotrope among other journals and have been included in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award.

Sholeh Wolpé's literary work includes five collections of poetry, several plays, three books of translations, and three anthologies. Her most recent publications include The Conference of the Birds (W.W. Norton & Co), Cómo escribir una canción de amor (Olifante Ediciones de Poesia, Spain), and Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths (University of Arkansas Press.) Her play, an adaptation of The Conference of the Birds, premiered at Ubuntu Theatre Project in Oakland, California in 2019, and her new play Brothers at the Canadian Border is part of Towne Street Theatre festival in Hollywood in 2020.

Wolpé has performed her literary work with musicians at The Broad Stage, Skirball Cultural Center Series, Los Angeles Aloud, LA County Museum of Art Ahmanson stage, Singapore Literature Festival, UNSW School of Arts and Media theater, and other venues. She taught poetry and literary translation at UCLA, at the University of Maine's Stonecoast MFA program in the United States. Presently she is the Author-in-Residence at UC Irvine. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, sociologist Edward Telles.

Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of six books, including The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (2014, W.W. Norton), which was selected as one of The New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books. It is based on her piece on menopause in The Best American Essays 2012, originally published in The Atlantic. The Madwoman in the Volvo inspired Sandra's hit play of the same name, as well as her stand-up show, The B***h Is Back: An All-Too Intimate Conversation, which ran at The Broad Stage in 2015. Her new book The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem will be published by W.W. Norton in June 2020.

Lory Bedikian received her BA from UCLA with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Poetry. During her time at UCLA, she was twice nominated for the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she received the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her manuscript has been selected several times as a finalist in both the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition. She currently teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles.

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer, Claire Messud writes, she "illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination-a contemporary Orpheus."

Her recently published collections include Life in a Country Album (2019 US / 2020 UK), Handal has worked on over twenty theatrical productions either as a playwright, director or producer. Author of eight plays, her most recent works have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in London.