Zubair Ahmed
What: Zubair Ahmed Reading and Book Signing: “City of Rivers” (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2012)
When: Friday, January 4, 7:30Where: Lucky Dog Books, 10801 Garland Road, Dallas, TX 75218Hosted by: WordSpace and Lucky Dog BooksAdmission: FREEMore Info and Contact: Karen@wordspace.us, 214-838-3554Directions: 214-827-4860 and Google Maps
Zubair Ahmed was born in 1988 and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2005, his family won the Diversity Visa Lottery, which granted them the opportunity to immigrate to the US. During the year-and-a-half before moving, Ahmed dropped out of school and became a professional video gamer. In 2005, Ahmed’s family moved to Duncanville, Texas, where he finished high school. Ahmed now studies mechanical engineering and creative writing at Stanford University. He is a member of the Stanford Solar Car Team, president of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honors Society, and has recently delved into business and startups.
City of Rivers by Zubair Ahmed (December 2012)
The poems in CIty of Rivers— the first full-length collection from 23-year-old wunderkind Zubair Ahmed– are clear and cool as a glass of water. Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh, Ahmed’s spare, evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world, telling us what it’s like to be displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful, mysterious pathos– and also with joy, humor, and longing– with the full range of human emotions. City of Rivers is a remarkable and precocious debut.
“This is a kind of art that can’t be faked or manufactured, a poetry derived only of witness, impulse, and vision. City of Rivers is a triumph by any standard.” — Michael McGriff
“When reading Zubair Ahmed I feel as though I am both witnessing and taking part in an ecstatic, lyric experience. Ahmed’s work is not just a blues forged out of the Bangladesh landscape, these poems are also a celebration of the world as a whole– a sometimes complicated, dark celebration, but a celebration all the same.” — Matthew Dickman
Zubair Ahmed « McSweeney’s – YouTube
