Celebration of the Life and Works of Abbas Safari

Department: Center for Persian Studies and Culture

Date and Time: July 16, 2021 | 10:00 AM-11:30 AM

Event Location: Zoom

Event Details

Please join us on Friday, July 16, 2021 at 10:00 AM PST for a virtual celebration of the life and works of Iranian poet and translator, Abbas Safari.

This event will be in PERSIAN.

AbbasSafari)

Born in 1951 in the central Iranian city of Yazd, Abbas Safari had lived in the U.S. since 1979. While still in high school in Iran, he wrote lyrics for several popular singers, including Farhad Mehrad’s classic song “Captured by Night”. He was the author of “Confluence of Hands and Apples”, “Twilight of Presence” and “Old Camera and Other Poems”. He translated numerous books into Persian, including “Moon and the Solitude of Lovers” by Izumi Shikibu and Lady Komachi] and “Egyptian Love Poems” by Ezra Pound and Noel Stock. He was a co-founder and poetry editor of the Iranian literary magazines “Sang” and “Cactus” in exile. He studied sculpture at California State University, Long Beach. His first collection of poems won the Baran Book Prize in Sweden in 1993. He also became the first poet in the diaspora to win the Karnameh Poetry Prize in Iran. In 2010, his long poem “Our Story” narrating the Adam and Eve story was added to the 9th edition of “Literature: The Human Experience”, a favorite anthology for American students, as one of the subsections in the book’s chapter, “Looking Farther: Forbidden Love”. In 2011, Safari showcased a collection of his woodcuts featuring American life during the Great Depression of the 1930s and some artworks on Yazd’s Wind Towers during an exhibition in Tehran. Some 25 woodcuts featured glimpses of the lives of American people in New York and Chicago streets during the Great Depression under the title of “The Hat that the Wind Blew Away”. The woodcuts depict Yazd’s wind towers, which were put on view under the title of “Greeting Breeze”. He passed away in January 2021 at the age of 69 in Long Beach, CA. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

This webinar will be in PERSIAN.

Registration is required. This event is presented by UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture.