In conjunction with To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)Permanent Collection, BAMPFA presents a reading with poets Solmaz Sharif and Geoffrey G. O’Brien.

Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, and holds degrees from UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Shirley Shenker Chair of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of the collections Experience in Groups (Wave Books, 2018), People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), Metropole (University of California Press, 2011), Green and Gray (University of California Press, 2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (University of California Press, 2002). He was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa and has taught at Brooklyn College, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been the Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary’s College of California. His work has been published in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. He is currently Professor of English at UC Berkeley.