With precise sentences and surprising imagery, Chicago-based Ladan Osman writes poetry about the complexity of being a girl and a woman. In 2014 her chapbook Ordinary Heaven appeared in Seven new Generation African Poets, and in 2015, she published the full-length poetry collection The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, which won the Sillerman’s First Book Prize. The characters in her poems observe themselves and the world with wonder, and the duality in an American and a Somali identity emerges in everyday situations. She will meet literary critic Eivind Myklebust for a conversation.
English Ladan Osman and Eivind Myklebust Wergeland Litteraturhuset Somaliske dager. A Nation of Poets