Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air, Six Muslim Women in STEM
b'These six poets met as undergrads at MIT, brought together by the many things they shared: the challenges of being women in STEM, their lifelong pursuits of becoming better Muslims, and the exhaustion of drinking from the academic firehose. Through sharing their poetry, they want to foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for those who don\\u2019t often see someone like them within literary spaces. The poems they share at this reading focus on family, identity, and homeland\\u2014where they come from and how that shaped who they are now.\\n\\nThe evening\\u2019s readers were introduced by Indran Amirthanayagam, who produced a \\u201cworld record\\u201d in 2020 publishing three poetry collections written in three different languages. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty two poetry books, including Isle\\xf1o (R.I.L. Editores), Blue Window (translated by Jennifer Rathbun) (Di\\xe1logos Books), Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks.com), The Migrant States, Coconuts on Mars, The Elephants of Reckoning (winner 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize), Uncivil War, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com).\\n\\n** Readers:\\n\\n* Afeefah Khazi-Syed\\n\\n* Aleena Shabbir\\n\\n* Ayse Angela Guvenilir\\n\\n* Maisha M. Prome\\n\\n* Mariam Eman Dogar\\n\\n* Marwa Abdulhai'