by Haleh Liza Gafori
Date: Wednesday, December 10 at 2:00 PM PST
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Date: Saturday, December 13 at 11:00 AM PST Follow up interfaith conversation
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Description
Water - Rumi
Look beyond form.
Look into the faceless face of Love.
You are that Love.
You are the house - the dwelling place of Love- and its maker.
Translation Haleh Liza Gafori

About the Author Haleh Liza Gafori
HALEH LIZA GAFORI is a performance artist, translator, vocalist, poet, and musician born in NYC of Persian descent. WATER is her second volume after her acclaimed book of translations, GOLD, Poems by Rumi was published in 2022. A bicultural woman with ears tuned to the music of American free verse as well as to the subtleties of the Persian text, Gafori aims to transmit the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poems into contemporary American poetry.
Gafori is a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts grant supporting the development of her cross-media performance piece based on GOLD. Weaving translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English, she offers audiences glimpses of the astonishing rhythm and wordplay of Rumi’s original text, while uncovering how deeply and urgently the poetry dialogues with our times.
Sharing her passion for Rumi’s poetry and the liberating messages that pulse through them, Gafori has presented her musical cross-media piece, lectures, readings, and craft workshops at universities, festivals, and institutions including Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Sarah Lawrence College, Lincoln Center, Omega Institute, Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub, the Bradford Literary Fest, and the New York Public Library.
Of her seminars at the Academy of American Poets, Executive Director Ricardo Maldonado, said “I have never seen this kind of enthusiasm for a class and teacher.”
Gafori received her BS in Biology from Stanford U and her MFA from CCNY in Poetry where she completed a thesis of original poems as well as translations of the Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri, for which she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. After receiving her MFA, she spent many years composing music, sometimes for TV and film, touring with various projects, and playing such venues as the Bonnaroo Festival, Preservation Jazz Hall in New Orleans, and David Byrne’s series at Carnegie Hall, She sat around fires and beside rivers in jungles and cities, listening and learning songs and chants, in Persian and English, and sometimes in Spanish, Yoruban, and Portuguese. All of these experiences prepared her to return once again to the culture of her ancestral roots, and in 2016, she began to translate the poetry of Molana Rumi who had spiraled through her life since childhood. Now, after completing two volumes, she is working on essays about the translation process and on a book of her own poems.
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