Drop-in Collection Tour—Poetry in the Galleries with Mona Kareem

About the program

Focusing on the Museum’s Native American collection, the exhibition Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and the short film Pendulum by Haitian Canadian artist Manuel Mathieu, Kareem’s tour explores ways we can read artworks through the lens of poetry, taking into consideration how literature and the visual arts address questions of art, craft, and authorship. 

Mona Kareem is a poet, translator, and scholar and is the author of four poetry collections and several chapbooks. She teaches Arabic and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Kareem’s work has been translated into nine languages, including the bilingual Arabic-English selection I Will Not Fold These Maps (World’s Poets Series, London 2023). She has been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nickle Copper, Poetry Northwest, Poetry London, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship, the Arab American National Museum, and Princeton University, among other institutions. She is the translator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Ra’ad Abdul Qadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread, and Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within.