Poet Shailja Patel
performed some of her works:
Shilling Love
November 21st, 2009
Described as "the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy" (The Gulf Today), Kenyan artist-activist, Shailja Patel performs in venues ranging from New York's Lincoln Centre to Durban's Poetry Africa Festival. Her one-woman show, “Migritude I: When Saris Speak” received a prolonged standing ovation at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi. The show premiered at ODC Theatre in San Francisco, received Ford Foundation funding for a critically-acclaimed Kenya Tour, and was the subject of 2007's Season Premiere of SPARK! award-winning arts show on California TV.
Migritude I: When Saris Speak was published in 2008, in a bilingual Italian-English edition, by Lietocolle, and launched at the Genoa International Poetry Festival. Patel opened and closed the first World Authors and Literary Translators Conference (WALTIC) in Stockholm, 2008, with her performances, and featured at the Internazionale Festival this year.
CNN characterizes Patel as an artist "who exemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange."
Awards include a Creation Fund Award from the National Performance Network, the inaugural Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award from IRN-Africa, the Voices of Our Nations Poetry Award. Patel's work is in the collections of the International Museum of Women, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Asian American Poets Collection at New York University. In 2009, Patel will be writer-in-residence at the Nordic Africa Institute (Sweden) and the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
