Poetry & Amnesty International - Human Rights Talk

Each year, Poetry International welcomes poets from all over the world. Poets who sometimes write about very intimate matters, sometimes about very big stories. Some of the poets who visit us each year write sincerely and compassionately about human rights abuses in their own countries, something that is strongly reflected in their poetry and the way they use their art. In partnership with Amnesty International, an organization dedicated to the rights of not only writers, but people worldwide, we are hosting a Human Rights Talk during this festival. During this talk, three poets who are vocal about their struggle to improve human rights will talk about their experiences with freedom of expression and its curtailment to moderator Eleni Kyriacou.

Amnesty International will also be present with a booth in the foyer; after this program, moderators from Amnesty International will guide you to the foyer so you, as an audience member, can talk further with a moderator and the panelists about this issue and what you can do to help.

Somaia Ramish is a prolific poet, writer and women rights activist in the past two decades in Afghanistan. She is currently a research PhD student at the University of Delhi, India in the field of Literature. She has been an elected representative of the people in the Herat Provincial Council--a renowned province in the western Afghanistan. Ramish is also a prolific writer whose articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines, nationally and internationally. She has also written poems that have been published and translated in many international publications and a few set to music, most recently by Conspirer Opera in Texas. After the fall of Afghanistan at the hand of Taliban in 2021, Somaia Ramish and her family came to The Netherlands and sought asylum, as living for them under the rule of the Taliban was no longer possible and there was imminent threat to their lives. After the Taliban banned all kinds of art in Afghanistan, Samia Ramish created Baamdaad - House of Poetry in Exile. In this way, she works against censorship and suppression. Baamdaad – house of poetry in Exile creates solidarity amongst poets worldwide who yearn for freedom and is also an artistic protest to create a better world through art!

Felix Chow is a poet and academic from Hong Kong. In his work, Chow is not afraid to deal with heavy and highly political topics, such as the Hong Kong student protests of 2019. Being a young person living in Hong Kong is central to his poetic and academic work. He also concerns himself with and makes use of the playfulness of Kongish, the type of English fused with Cantonese that is spoken in Hong Kong. Chow double-majored in English and Hong Kong Studies, achieving first-class honours at the University of Hong Kong, and is currently working as a research assistant at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University’s School of Arts and Social Sciences. His poems have been published in several journals such as the Lincoln Review, Voice and Verse and CHA: An Asian Literary Journal. Additionally, Chow is a co-organizer of OutLoud Hong Kong, Hong Kong’s longest running English poetry collective. He also works as an English tutor. Felix Chow has been honoured with several awards such as the Maisie Choa English Poetry Prize and has won the HKBU Century Club Citywide English Poetry Competition. For five weeks, including during Poetry International Festival 2024, Felix Chow will be the Poet in Residence at Poetry International.

Cristóbal Bianchi works at the intersection of poetics, memory, and social change. Combining large-space public intervention, activism, performance, and time-based work, Bianchi is the author of four works of poetry,  El trigo oscuro de mi boca  (Ediciones Sudamérica),  Avistamientos  (Editorial Aparte), and the film poems  Factories at Sea  (currently screening in  film festivals) and Father  (Galeria AFA); the creator or co-creator of over fifteen public art and poetry installations in Chile; a video-film artist exhibiting in galleries in Santiago de Chile and London; and the founder of the Casagrande Art Collective, an internationally renowned art group that has developed several series of public art interventions, including the  Bombing of Poems, which consists of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed as bookmarks over cities that have suffered aerial bombing campaigns during past military confrontations. This intervention has occurred eight times to date in cities around the world, including Santiago de Chile (2001), Guernica (2004), Warsaw (2009), Berlin (2010), London (2012), and Madrid (2018).  He earned his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is an assistant professor at Studio Art, School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.