THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Solmaz Sharif
Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (Pocket Poets Series, No. 57, 2005)
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (from 1976)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (from Hill and Wang, 1982)
Aime Cesaire, On Colonialism (from Monthly Review Press, 1972)
Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief (from Archipelago, 2010)
June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America (Something like a sonnet for Phillis Wheatley)”
Abbas Kiarostami, Close-up (film distributed by Celluloid Dreams, 1990)
Chris Marker, Le Joli Mai (film released 1963)
Michel de Montaigne, “To philosophize is to learn how to die” (from Essays, 1603)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (from Picador, 2004)
About Solmaz Sharif
Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Granta, and others. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and an NEA fellowship. She was most recently selected to receive a 2016 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award.