Author Archives: Gandy Dancer Staff

Posted by Natalie Hayes, Managing Editor for 8.1

On October 21^st, SUNY Geneseo hosted its second Literary Forum Reading of the semester wherein Professor Lytton Smith introduced Aisha Sharif, a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize recipient, to read from her debut poetry collection, To Keep from Undressing. Given Sharif is an African American Muslim woman who was raised in Bible Belt, the collection tackles the issues closest to Sharif—that is, identities and the intersection of said identities. She, both in the collection and in the reading, outlines the strange spaces she’s occupied as a result of being both African American and Muslim. (To hear more about this from the poet herself, check out her interview with The Kansas City Star.)

Sharif’s reading felt, at times, like a TED Talk; she showed family photographs and told childhood stories in between poems, making her story and consequent poetry feel all the more tangible. She sang a haunting song when she read a deeply emotional poem about a boy ripping off her hijab on the school bus, and I mean that literally—she sang the poem, and it was striking. That same evocative, lingering hum comes through in her work even without her singing it, though; there’s a profound sense of simultaneous pain and pride in Sharif’s reflections on her identity and, too, in the life-long pursuit, both in its wins and its loses, of that identity.

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