Join award-winning poet and artist Hedy Habra as she shares key insights on the influences that led her to develop a passion for art and poetry in a talk titled “A Dialogue on the Intersection of Visual Poetry & Visual Art.”
Habra will read ekphrastic poetry from her recently released collection, Under Brushstrokes, and showcase the artworks that have inspired her poems at this free event, which will take place from 6-8 p.m. Thursday, April 7, 2016, at the University Club of Santa Barbara, located at 1332 Santa Barbara Street.
Habra’s first collection of poems, Tea in Heliopolis, addresses the process of sketching and painting in conjunction with memory.
In her recent book, Under Brushstrokes, she delves into artworks of different styles and periods to offer poems, in prose and in verse, from a variety of perspectives, giving voice to characters in the paintings or engaging in a dialog with artists such as Klimt, Schiele, Dalí, Van Gogh, Bosch, Tanner and Hokusai.
Habra uses visual art as a point of departure for a surreal or oneiric recreation that goes beyond mere description. Her poems are rich in imagery and stand on their own independently from the artwork.
“Habra explores the stages of art — from thought to modeling to canvas — revealing the layered connections between the individual and art itself. These are poems of depth and skill, of beauty and paradox, of ‘words suffused / in linseed oil,’ as Habra writes — a marvel of a work,” writes Sam Rasnake, editor of Blue Fifth Review
According to Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern, “The poems, in Habra’s new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible — by demonstrating it.”
Habra has authored two poetry collections, Under Brushstrokes, finalist for the 2015 USA Best Book Award, and Tea in Heliopolis, winner of the 2014 USA Best Book Award and finalist for the International Poetry Book Award.
Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American National Book Award’s Honorable Mention. She is a recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Awards and was a five-time nominee for a Pushcart and Best of the Net in 2015.
Her work appears in Cimarron Review, Bitter Oleander, Blue Fifth Review, Cider Press Review, Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, World Literature Today and elsewhere.
Learn more at her website at www.hedyhabra.com.
— Jacques Habra is an entrepreneur coach and consultant representing Hedy Habra.