City of Pearls Book Blessing for Sham-e-ali Nayeem

Please join us to celebrate the release of City of Pearls!

With special guests: ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, MANJU RAJENDRAN and VANESSA HUANG

In her debut book City of Pearls, Sham-e-Ali Nayeem’s poetry offers a meditation on healing from grief. The poems ask the reader, what happens when we lose our anchor? Weaving together memories of her late father and ancestral home of Hyderabad, India, Nayeem’s poems explore landscapes of loss. She writes from the perspective of an Indian Muslim American who draws from the languages of her life to compose a poetics of vulnerability and tenderness. Known as the “City of Pearls,” Hyderabad’s jewels become a metaphor for resilience. Each poem gains their opulence from the transmutation of the grit of migration, displacement and loss.

Sham-e-Ali Nayeem: Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is a poet and visual artist who was born in Hyderabad, India and raised in both the UK and the US. A former public interest lawyer supporting economic justice for survivors of family and intimate partner violence, she is the recipient of the Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship. She is the author of the collection of poems, City of Pearls (Upset Press 2019). Sham E-Ali Nayeem

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, also published by Duke University Press; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina. Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Manju Rajendran: Manju Rajendran is a facilitator with AORTA, a worker cooperative devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy. Manju brings 27 years of local, state, regional, and national-level experience in popular education, healing, strategy, organizing, fundraising, and communications. Manju co-founded Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, her family’s food justice restaurant. Manju Rajendran

Vanessa Huang: Born in Berkeley and home in diaspora from California and Taipei to Atlanta, New York, and Tianjin, Vanessa Huang is a multimedia poet, artist, and cultural worker whose practice inherits teachings from the prison industrial complex abolition, gender liberation, and intersecting social justice movements. For over 15 years, Vanessa has worked to shift cultural narratives and strategies based in fear, violence, and exploitation towards realities centering love, vision, and transformation. quiet of chorus (UpSet Press 2018) is Vanessa’s debut poetry collection. Vanessa Huang