The 2024 Poetry Hotline
Selected poets
Hotline #: 207-828-5600
Starting Saturday, December 16th, SPACE will connect the 2024 Poetry Hotline, a 24/7 call-in number and ongoing audio exhibit featuring a new poem every few weeks. The hotline is 207-828-5607.
April 1-30, 2024
Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)
“If I Must Die”
Read by Fateh Azzam
Refaat Alareer (1979–2023) was a professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2013). He was killed by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023, along with his brother, nephew, his sister, and three of her children.
Fateh Azzam (author) was born in Beirut, his parents having fled Palestine in April 1948. He began work in theater in Maine as a mime, before moving to Boston in 1980 to work as an actor and choreographer. In 1985 he moved to Ramallah and was administrative director of the Nuzha – El Hakawati theatre in East Jerusalem. He returned to returned to Maine in 2016 after a 35-year international career in human rights advocacy that spanned work in NGOs, philanthropy, academia and the United Nations. He was a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and an Affiliate at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, and the former director of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship and Senior Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Relations, both at the American University in Beirut. He led the process of establishing the Arab Human Rights Fund. In 2024, Fateh co-produced and co-directed a stage production of The Gaza Monologues, originally written and produced by teenagers in Gaza in 2010, with students from Bowdoin College and Portland Public Schools. It was performed to two sold-out audiences at SPACE.
February 12, 2024–March 31, 2024
Iris McCloughan
“Made of Meat”
Iris McCloughan (they/them) is a writer, artist, and performance maker in New York City. Iris was the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review and was named a finalist in nonfiction for Best of the Net 2020. They are the author of three poetry chapbooks, including triptych (greying ghost, 2022) and Bones to Peaches (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). Their writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Prelude, Tupelo Quarterly, juked, jubilat, Gertrude, Denver Quarterly, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, among many others.
Iris’s performance work has been presented in New York (The Poetry Project, Castelli Gallery, Ars Nova, Movement Research at Judson Church, PAGEANT), Philadelphia (Institute of Contemporary Art, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Contemporary), Chicago (Links Hall), Minneapolis (Bryant-Lake Bowl), and Detroit (Public Pool). Most recently, they directed the Off-Broadway premiere of Alex Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Playwrights Horizons). They have collaborated with many other artists and writers, including Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, Mike Lala, Toby Altman, Jessie Young, Doug LeCours, and Julie Mayo.
Follow them on Instagram @immcclou.
Stay tuned as we fill out the 2024 Poetry Hotline schedule, updated every few weeks through Spring 2024.
January 14, 2024 – February 11, 2024
2.
Sa Whitley
“Prayer Circle”
Call 207-828-5607 to hear Sa read the poem.
Sa Whitley (they/them) is a Black queer feminist poet and postdoctoral scholar in the School of Social Transformation and Women & Gender Studies at Arizona State University. They are a Cave Canem Fellow and a Poetry & the Senses Fellow with the Arts Research Center (ARC) at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
Whitley has published recent work in POETRY Magazine and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and they have received literary fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2022) and the Community of Writers. Whitley received a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and has held previous academic appointments with the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. In their spare time, they go to queer dance parties and watch sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.
Follow them on Instagram @bonitalemonbalm.
December 16, 2023 – January 14, 2024
1.
Noor Hindi, “Ode to Friendship”
Noor Hindi (she/her) is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2025). She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Follow her on Instagram @NoorKHindi.
The 2024 Poetry Hotline is a screenless exhibition available to anyone with access to a phone. The 2024 Poetry Hotline offers audiences a direct line to Maine-based and national poets and their visions for the future, and another medium to connect and inspire audiences with heartache, love, humor, rage, and regeneration.