Thursday, October 15, 2026 |  2:00pm–3:00pm
Heimbold Visual Arts Center HEIM 202 Donnelley Film Theatre

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale at the event by Transom Bookshop.

What does the speaker desire, and what is in the way of what they desire? Thinking through various forms of want, illusion, disillusion, and pressure in narrative poetry and how they inform action, inaction, concealment, and revelation. How does intention and its interruption impact time, tense, and tension in a poem? A talk for the lovers, and for everyone fighting the air seeking eros in its many forms.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden, winner of a Whiting Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman Prize. Her poems have been translated into over 10 languages. Osman's photographs and experimental media have been exhibited by Bienal de São Paulo, Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, HKW, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Arts Incubator, Ύλη[matter]HYLE, and the New York African Film Festival. Her films include: WAVES, The Ascendants, Sam Underground, The Fly Collectors, and Sun of the Soil. These films have played in numerous festivals and were awarded an ECU Award for Best Independent Documentary, and a Dikalo Award for Best Short Documentary, among other honors. She lives in New York.