Please join us for an evening with Iman Mersal, introduced by Douglas Unger, novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

About Iman Mersal

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar. Currently associate professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta, Canada, she is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Paris Review, The Nation, and American Poetry Review, among others. In 2008, These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of Mersal’s work translated into English by Khaled Mattawa, was by Sheep Meadow Press, and in 2022, The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mersal's other recent publications include Kayfa Talta’im: ‘An al-Umuma wa Ashbahiha, which was published in 2017. In 2018, it was translated into English by Robin Moger as How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts and published by Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press (Berlin). Mersal is also the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for her creative nonfiction work Fi Athar Enayat Al-Zayyat (Traces of Enayat al-Zayyat), published in 2019 by Kotob Khan (Cairo). Robin Moger’s translation, Traces of Enayat, is forthcoming in August 2023 from And Other Stories, UK.

Parking and Directions

The Goldfield Room is on the third floor of UNLV’s Lied Library. Parking on campus is free starting at 1 p.m. on Fridays.

If you have any questions, please email blackmountaininstitute@unlv.edu or call 702-895-5542.